Court dismisses libel suit against Daily Caller filed by ex-congressional IT staffers

The Superior Court of the District of Columbia dismissed a libel suit Friday against the news publication The Daily Caller over claims made against several congressional IT staffers in articles published 2017-2019.

The case against the Daily Caller and the Daily Caller News Foundation was dismissed because it was originally filed Jan. 28, 2020, past the one-year statute of limitations for statute of limitations cases, Judge Fern Flanagan Saddler said. 

The case was filed by a group of Pakistani-Americans: Imran Awan, his wife, his two brothers and a friend – who all worked in the House of Representative’s IT department against the Daily Caller over articles written by reporter Luke Rosiak, according to First Amendment Watch.

The group alleged that starting in 2017, articles published by Rosiak in The Daily Caller targeted them and claimed they committed crimes including hacking, espionage, and theft.

"Imran Awan is basically an attempted murderer, an extortionist, a blackmail artist, a con man," Rosiak said in an interview in July 2019 with The Epoch Times, according to The Washington Post. "This was a story of actual hacking, blackmail, collusion with foreign governments, threats, evidence tampering," Rosiak allegedly said.

Awan and the others were eventually fired. Awan later went on to pled guilty to an unrelated offense of making a false statement on a bank loan application. Later, federal prosecutors announced their investigation did not find evidence that any laws had been broken in relation to the House’s computer system.