Obstruction of Justice Read online

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD Newt Gingrich

  INTRODUCTION

  ONE “Only God Can Help Me”

  TWO Fraud on Capitol Hill

  THREE The Election Season Hack You Never Heard About

  FOUR The Puppeteer

  FIVE Panic

  SIX A “Theft Investigation”

  SEVEN News Dump

  EIGHT Frightening Connections

  NINE Playing Dumb

  TEN Power of Attorney

  ELEVEN “Rob You with Their Tongues”

  TWELVE Pakistan

  THIRTEEN Back in the House

  FOURTEEN Laptop in a Phone Booth

  FIFTEEN Media Malpractice: See Something, Say Nothing

  SIXTEEN Arrest

  SEVENTEEN Insider Threats

  EIGHTEEN Insurance

  NINETEEN Hell Hath No Fury like a Sharia Wife Scorned

  TWENTY Jeff Sessions Is Mr. Magoo

  TWENTY-ONE Cover-Up

  TWENTY-TWO The Prosecution Sleeps

  TWENTY-THREE Aftermath

  EPILOGUE

  INDEX OF AFFECTED HOUSE MEMBERS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NOTES

  For my daughters Olivia, who was born when I began this investigation, and Avery, who was born as it ended. Their natural joy and directness kept me grounded as I was immersed in a world that seemed self-preservationist, hypocritical, and cynical at every turn.

  FOREWORD

  NEWT GINGRICH

  I am delighted to write this foreword for Luke Rosiak’s remarkable book, Obstruction of Justice, which exposes corruption and a coverup by the United States House of Representatives.

  President Trump wrote: “The Democrat I.T. scandal is a key to much of the corruption we see today.” This book shows how right he is; in fact, it exposes three different parallel scandals:

  1. The actual, alleged illegalities involving Democratic members of the House of Representatives, including the system that IT aide Imran Awan and his associates created for stealing money, equipment, and, potentially, information from the House.

  2. The failure of the Republican leadership to investigate aggressively and expose the various aspects of the scandal.

  3. The failure of the liberal media to cover what is possibly the biggest scandal in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives.

  All three scandals would have remained hidden if it was not for the remarkable, persistent, and courageous work of one reporter: Luke Rosiak.

  When I first noticed Luke’s stories, I thought they made interesting assertions but were not a part of a particularly big scandal. The facts seemed so improbable—more than forty Democratic House members involved; the former chair of the Democratic National Committee protecting the alleged crooks less than a year after the DNC offices had been hacked under her watch; the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and possibly millions in wages for no-show work; a former McDonald’s manager being paid by House Democrats as an IT specialist; five Pakistanis led by Imran Awan who had questionable business dealings in the U.S. and Pakistan; the list went on and on.

  At first, I shrugged off the stories as the exaggerations of an ambitious reporter eager to make his name. After twenty years in the House, the last four as the first Republican Speaker in forty years, I concluded that I was curious but unconvinced. It all seemed too bizarre, too complicated, and too far-fetched.

  After all, I reasoned, if the scandal was that big, the major media would be all over it, and the House Republicans would be demanding investigations, holding hearings, and turning it into a major liability for the Democrats in the 2016 (and 2018) elections. After all, a party that had almost one out of five of its elected members connected to a scandal would be a party on defense.

  Instead, there was amazing silence.

  Luke would find another amazing piece of evidence and write another remarkable story, yet nothing would happen.

  The liberal media, busy chasing every possible rumor about President Trump, apparently had no time or energy to report on a scandal involving Democratic congressional members.

  What finally convinced me to take this scandal seriously was Luke’s persistent hard work that produced a steady and consistent drumbeat of new, fact-based stories with reputable sources. I asked my team at Gingrich Productions to pull together all of Luke’s articles and I shared them with former House members who had been part of the Majority when I was Speaker. One of them, Congressman Bob Livingston, was a former prosecutor who read the material and said, “Luke Rosiak has persevered successfully where traditional law enforcement dropped the ball. His conclusions are shocking.”

  Another House colleague of mine, Congressman Bob Walker commented, “The U.S. House of Representatives was disgraced by the use of Pakistanis to run internal IT networks and then by the failure to hold those who hired the Pakistanis responsible for jeopardizing our national security and misusing taxpayer money.”

  Then I went to Capitol Hill and met with a group of Republican House members who were deeply frustrated by their leadership and were convinced that a lot of bad things had happened—and that the fix was in to protect the Awan associates and the Democrats.

  Congressman Louie Gohmert wrote to me, “Imran Awan seems to have been at the center of what was likely the biggest scandal in Congressional history. Yet, with the motto of House Republican elected leaders being, ‘When there’s no drama, we win,’ they were not only blatantly wrong, but they did enormous damage to the country. Luke Rosiak did an amazing job while being stonewalled by House leadership, as misrepresentations were apparently being made within the FBI to the attorney general about this whole matter.”

  Every American who is concerned about corruption in Washington should read Luke’s book on what is possibly the largest scandal and coverup in the history of the United States House of Representatives.

  Here are the facts.

  There was a familial syndicate of five Pakistanis offering IT services to one-fifth of the House Democratic Party.

  Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former Democratic National Committee Chair, protected, defended, and continued to employ IT leader Imran Awan even after he had been removed from the House network. In fact, she was so protective of the IT scandal that at one point, Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz, member of a committee in charge of the Capitol Police’s budget, threatened the Capitol Police with “consequences” if they did not accede to her demands.

  With more than forty House Democrats implicated in hiring or dealing with the Awan associates, they put such pressure on the House Republicans that the entire mess has, until now, been hushed up, covered up, and minimized.

  Luke captures this entire disaster in two brutally honest paragraphs:

  This is not a partisan book. What it exposes is the “Uniparty”— a core of entrenched, establishment, career politicians and bureaucrats whose overriding goal is to preserve their power and the status quo.

  Establishment Republicans might be more embarrassed by this book than Democrats. The Democrats portrayed here are scheming, dishonest, and cutthroat; but at least they are good at it. They work with their allies in the media and the bureaucracy to accomplish their self-serving goals with Machiavellian precision. The Republicans, meanwhile, are apathetic, myopic, gullible, and cowardly.

  Based on Luke’s reporting, I knew that House members, staff, the Awan associates, and others needed to be held accountable. I waited until after the 2018 election—to avoid any taint of politics—and then wrote to U.S. House of Representatives Inspector General Mike Ptasienski.

  In my letter, I noted that:

  As a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representative
s and a concerned private citizen, I am alarmed by the appearance of a cover-up of serious crimes committed by a former House employee and his associates, as well as, potentially, members of the House of Representatives themselves . . .

  To help reassure the American people that our nation’s leaders stand for honesty, accountability, and transparency, this letter is a formal request to ask for the release of the two PowerPoint presentations given on September 20, 2016 and September 30, 2016 by your office to House leadership.

  The presentations provide critical information pertaining to the possible invoice manipulation, equipment theft, illicit cyber activities, irregular cyber-related login and usage patterns, and outside storage of House data by Imran Awan and his associates.

  The plea agreement for Mr. Awan, court appearances, and reported conversations with witnesses connected to the FBI’s investigation of Awan and his associates’ activities suggests that the FBI (while working with the United States Capitol Police) and the Department of Justice have avoided conducting a thorough and meticulous investigation.

  For example, in the July 2018 plea agreement, the DOJ stated that approximately forty witnesses were interviewed throughout the duration of the investigation. Upon further examination, this number seems substantially inadequate for an investigation potentially involving so many individuals. While employed by the House for thirteen years as shared IT employees, the Awan associates worked for more than sixty members, and in 2015, 2016, and 2017, the Awan associates were on the payrolls of approximately forty members each year. When taking into account the members, the staff of each member, fellow House IT colleagues and peers, and additional business associates, the forty interviews that were conducted appear to be remarkably insufficient to support the argument that an investigation of this magnitude was conducted thoroughly.

  In connection with the investigation, it has also been reported that key witnesses were only contacted days or hours before the plea agreement was signed. In another case, a witness was asked to be interviewed by the FBI but was prohibited from bringing any documents. Conducting investigative interviews in this manner suggests that the FBI investigators merely wanted to be able to say that they contacted witnesses and raises significant questions as to whether these interviews were actually conducted in good faith.

  Aside from the alleged criminals themselves, this apparent collective effort of willful negligence sought to protect the involved members of Congress and their staffs—at the expense of the American people who they were entrusted to protect in the first place.

  The sheer scale and size of the alleged criminal activity, the potential damage it could have caused, and the continual threats it potentially poses for the United States, raises significant questions that every American deserves to have answered.

  In just one of the dozens of offices where one of the Awan associates were employed, almost $120,000 worth of equipment was written off of the House inventory, after he was unable to produce the equipment. An unofficial transcript of your office’s PowerPoint presentation from September 20, 2016 asserts that the “shared employee stated that the items were never received, shouldn’t have been inventoried, or the staff lost the equipment.” The flaw in this claim is emphasized by the transcribed statement that follows: “However, equipment could not be on inventory or have [an] asset tag unless it had arrive[d] in office and EIN had been signed.”

  The member of the office in question is a member of the Committee on Ethics.

  Additionally, more than $111,000 was paid by the House Democratic Caucus to one of the Awan associates throughout the duration of her employment. Members on the Committee of Foreign Affairs issued payments to associates totaling more than $950,000. Members of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence paid the associates over $530,000, while the Committee on the Judiciary paid more than $446,000. The Committee on Ethics paid more than $221,000, and the Committee on Homeland Security paid upwards of $175,000.

  Close ties between Pakistan and the Awan associates were also identified, including large amounts of property that were owned but not properly disclosed in House documents. A $165,000 home equity line of credit loan received in January 2017 was wired in its entirety—almost immediately—to two individuals in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Imran Awan pleaded guilty this summer to obtaining this exact loan illegally.

  These allegations and the accompanying investigation have been kept under such secrecy that the American people have been denied their fundamental right to know what happened, who is responsible, and what actions have been taken to ensure the fair and transparent administration of justice.

  The American people expect better than this. The United States Congress should be better than this.

  Releasing the requested documents is essential to show that the U.S. government will require every member of Congress to answer to his or her constituents and fellow citizens for his or her actions.

  If you choose to deny this request, I will appeal to the House membership to pass a resolution that will make public the two documents, and all additional documents that are related to the claims made against Imran Awan and his associates, investigators and law enforcement, and the House members and staffers who may be involved.

  Americans deserve truthful, complete answers to the questions that have been raised surrounding these extensive allegations.

  I could never have written this letter outlining the scale of this potential scandal without the years of hard work that Luke Rosiak has put into this case.

  His book is a must-read for everyone who wants to clean up corruption in Washington.

  INTRODUCTION

  The story you are about to read is like something out of a Hollywood movie, only it is all true. A family of Pakistani nationals gained access to all the files of one in five House Democrats. These IT aides—some of whom had dubious, at best, credentials, and had never been properly vetted—were caught funneling data off the House network, stealing the identity of an intelligence specialist, and sending electronic equipment to foreign officials. The manipulative mastermind of this operation had a penchant for extortion, and before he tried to flee to Pakistan with a suitcase of cash, he mysteriously left a congresswoman’s laptop in a phone booth at midnight.

  In the heat of the 2016 election's Russia fever, Democrats, Republican Speaker Paul Ryan, and the Department of Justice had a choice to make: protect national security or cover up a politically inconvenient scandal. They chose, of course, to cover up the scandal, and in the process, evidence disappeared, witnesses were threatened, and the press ignored the story.

  Except, essentially, for me and my employer, the Daily Caller News Foundation. For two years, I doggedly investigated this story, and what I found convinced me that the so-called “Deep State” absolutely exists, because I saw it in action. In this book, I will show you how it works.

  The most egregious actions in this scandal—documented in undeniable detail in this book—were taken by obscure bureaucrats who engaged in backstabbing, lies, and manipulation to ensure that justice was not done and the media was kept quiet. These actors have little to fear from civil service laws, and their near anonymity, not to mention their hold on a supposed watchdog press, shields them from scrutiny.

  When President Trump said, “The Democrat IT scandal is a key to much of the corruption we see today,” this is what he meant: this one momentous case reveals the Deep State in action to such a degree that it might as well be a blueprint for its insidious techniques. It is a case you may have never heard of, and if you have heard of it, most everything you heard was probably wrong, precisely because of the Deep State’s efforts.

  This is not a partisan book. What it exposes is the “Uniparty”—a core of entrenched, career politicians and bureaucrats whose overriding goal is to preserve their power and the status quo.

  Establishment Republicans might be more embarrassed by this book than Democrats. The Democrats portrayed here are scheming, dishonest, and cutthroat; but at least they
are good at it. They work with their allies in the media and the bureaucracy to accomplish their self-serving goals with Machiavellian precision. The Republicans, meanwhile, are apathetic, myopic, gullible, and cowardly.

  When national security is jeopardized, as it was in this case, who can we trust? The sad answer, when it comes to Washington scandals, is no one. Not the Democrats, at least not when the fault lies with them; not the establishment Republicans who value their images and bipartisanship over truth; not the bureaucrats who profit from the status quo; and not the Department of Justice, the interests of which are not justice, but the same self-serving agenda of any other bureaucracy—to go along and get along with the permanent powers that be.

  This book’s heroes decided not to go along. They bucked the system, took their responsibilities seriously, and tried to act even if it put their livelihoods at risk. For their trouble, they were threatened, abused, harassed, mocked, ignored, shot at, given ultimatums, and run out of their jobs.

  I hope this book will be, in some ways, their reward. It is the true story of the most successfully concealed of the 2016 election’s many scandals. It is a story that the media missed. It is a story that congressional Democrats, Republican Speaker Paul Ryan, and the Justice Department do not want you to know. I know this story because I lived it. You will know it because you will read about it here fully, in the pages that follow, for the first time.

  ONE

  “ONLY GOD CAN HELP ME”

  (FOURTH OF JULY, 2018)

  Sumaira Siddique can never go home again.

  Not to Pakistan, where she was a civil court judge and the daughter of a wealthy politician.

  She is stranded in government housing in Virginia, at least as long as her green card is valid, in a country where no one loves her and whose government will not protect her.

  It is the Fourth of July 2018, and I’m watching fireworks crackle like machine gun fire over the Capitol dome faintly visible on the Virginia skyline, talking and thinking about the events that began two years ago nearly to the day.