Obstruction of Justice Read online

  Until 2014, Representative Ted Deutch of Florida curiously paid Imran a few hundred dollars a year, enough to make him technically a staffer. More money went to Abid’s wife, Nataliia Sova. In recent years, the only member of the group on his payroll was McDonald’s employee Rao Abbas. Deutch also had another IT employee based in Florida, and he wouldn’t say what the purpose of all these aides was or whether he’d ever seen Abbas.

  With fierce competition for limited staffing slots, there is little reason for members of Congress to spend scarce salary funds on no-show workers unless there was something in it for them. The idea of a “ghost employee” scheme—where a congressman pays a no-show employee taxpayer funds in exchange for cash back under the table—is well known to Congress, and the idea that Democratic members of Congress might be involved in such a scheme with the Awans would have been enough for the Democratic leadership to want to block any investigation.

  Former Democratic Representative Corrine Brown of Florida is currently in prison for indulging such a scheme. Other current members of Congress have raised eyebrows, if not been prosecuted, for the people they have put on the congressional payroll.2

  A sizeable contingent of representative-elects come to Washington with notions of wealth and power only to find that they were unrecognizable back-bench members who suddenly had to maintain two households. The Awans’ most vocal advocates tended to be Congress’ poorest members. In 2008, as the Awans cemented their inroads in Congress, the Awans’ original patron, Robert Wexler, was deeply in debt. So was Andre Carson. Gregory Meeks, Yvette Clarke, Kendrick Meek, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz all ranked among the House’s most financially struggling.3 In later years, newer Awan employers, like Joaquin Castro, also were in debt.

  As of 2015, Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri had the second-biggest money problems in the House, with two million dollars in debt.4 He also paid Rao Abbas as his only IT employee. When my colleague Kerry Picket asked him about the cybersecurity implications of the Awan investigation, Congressman Cleaver said it had never occurred to him that the criminal investigation into his IT aide could mean his emails were at risk. He tried to dodge the question about the McDonald’s worker by saying, “Imran is the guy who worked in our office. I don’t know this other guy." Since Kerry got the whole thing on tape, an ethics group filed a complaint. “Cleaver used taxpayer dollars to pay over $60,000 to Abbas, who he did not know, and the evidence indicates did not do work for him,” it said. “There is no logical or reasonable explanation for Cleaver to affirmatively identify Awan as his employee unless Awan was the individual actually providing IT services. Cleaver accepted IT services and incredibly would have given full access to his data and files to someone who was not on his staff.” The complaint was filed by the Foundation for Accountability & Civic Trust, which was headed by Matthew Whitaker, who would go on, when it was too late, to replace Jeff Sessions as acting attorney general. But then, he was just a little-known attorney.

  And the ethics committee did nothing with the complaint, even though congressmen are in violation of House rules when they pay people who don't actually work for them and let non-staffers access their data.5

  The liberal group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has named Representative Gregory Meeks of New York on its annual list of corrupt congressmen more times than almost anyone else.6 A New York state bribery sting that brought down state lawmakers failed to implicate him after the person whose house was outfitted to record incriminating admissions found that Meeks “only meets in parks.” In 2007, Meeks took $40,000 from Queens businessman Edul Ahmad. When confronted by officials, he claimed it was a loan. But he “received the money without any discussion of interest rates, due dates, or collateral requirements,” and made no effort to repay the “loan” until 2010, after the FBI questioned Ahmad about the money. Though Meeks never disclosed any loan on three years of ethics statements, the House gave him a pass. Ahmad’s lawyer told the ethics body that there was no loan paperwork, but Meeks told them he’d “misplaced” it. Meeks turned his association with criminals—Ahmad was a convicted mortgage fraudster—into something that worked in his favor. “The committee found the credibility of the lender, Edul Ahmad, insufficient against the word of Representative Meeks because Mr. Ahmad had pled guilty to fraud charges in an unrelated case,” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington wrote. “Apparently, if members are caught illegally pocketing cash, they need only claim to have made an honest mistake and the House Ethics Committee will take them at their word.”

  Congress protects its own. The FBI had circumstantial evidence that the Awans might be involved in a kickback scheme with congressmen or chiefs of staff, in part because the Awans had been the subjects of hundreds of bank-generated suspicious activity reports flagging possibly criminal large-dollar transactions over the years.

  Proof was lacking, but so was a desire on the part of the Democrats in Congress to search for it.

  In the early 1990s, an investigation into embezzlement by a single House employee grew into one that found a large portion of congressmen systematically manipulating House finances. The leadership covered it up, and congressmen blamed incompetence by the institution’s back offices. But the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee eventually went to prison, in part for paying ghost employees. The scandal led to the replacing of the House bank with a credit union that was supposed to be less willing to do favors for insiders, and the creation of the inspector general’s office.

  TWELVE

  PAKISTAN

  An advanced investigative technique, “Googling it,” might have helped authorities learn everything they needed to know about Imran Awan if they had wanted to know.

  A 2009 article in the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, available online in English, revealed that Imran was a serial fraudster who surrounded himself with other morally compromised individuals, systematically exploited the vulnerable, double-crossed his partners, routinely extorted and threatened witnesses, framed his victims for crimes, and used political influence to get away with it.1

  The story was headlined “Influential expat shields father from long arm of law,” and centered on Muhammad Awan’s real estate development. According to the story, Muhammad had purchased “huge chunks of land from different farmers,” but his checks had bounced. A dozen farmers filed a criminal complaint against Muhammad and he was arrested. “The police high-ups,” however, “are ‘ominously’ indifferent to proceed against Awan,” because Imran, mistakenly identified as a White House employee, had intervened. “Sources said that some ‘power muscles’ in the federal capital as well as in the provincial capital had phoned the local police to lend all sorts of help to the U.S. national and his father,” Dawn reported, saying it was “noteworthy” how fervently they were “complying with the desires of the U.S. national.”

  Imran influenced the police to charge the victims with crimes instead, according to Dawn. The police “harassed” the farmers, who had lost everything they had to their names, and implicated them in “frivolous” cases. Imran filed outlandish claims, with police alleging that five elderly farmers had stolen four million rupees from him and subjected the then-twenty-seven-year-old to “severe torture.” The farmers swore they were nowhere near where Imran said this improbable beating had occurred. Nineteen people were subjected to retaliatory charges. Even the victims’ lawyer was arrested.

  “Muhammad Abid, a victim of Awan’s alleged high-profile swindling, said that Awan’s son had easy access to the corridors of power and that’s why he was able to [pressure] the police to dance to his tunes,” Dawn reported.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. Not long before, there was a car wreck on the side of one of Pakistan’s dangerous, winding roads. The car was carrying both of Imran’s parents as well as Shabbir Ahmed, one of Muhammad’s two business partners on the land deal. Ahmed and Imran’s mother Tahira were killed. Muhammad was injured, but survived. In the hours after his own mother tragicall
y died, Imran appeared to have one thing on his mind: how to gobble up Ahmed’s share of the company before Ahmed’s relatives could inherit it. According to the Dawn reporters, Ahmed’s grieving widow said that “Imran was threatening her with dire consequences for not transferring the remaining properties to his father’s name.” He also tracked down Ahmed’s brother in Lahore, who worked for the government, and harshly retaliated.

  The third business partner in the real estate deal, Rashid Minhas, had been arrested alongside Muhammad, and the paper commented that Muhammad Awan “distanced himself from Minhas,” leaving him to take the fall for the land fraud.

  I had seen Minhas’ name before. In the litany of Awan-related calls to the Fairfax County police that I obtained under Freedom of Information laws, there was an entry for alleged threats between Muhammad and Minhas. That suggested that Minhas was in the United States. As an Awan associate, the first place I thought to look for Minhas was prison. I was right. I also figured he might talk, because being locked up in the Federal Prison Center in Duluth, Minnesota, inmate number 43396-424 was safe from the Awan family.

  * * *

  Rashid Minhas is a criminal, so I took whatever he said with a big grain of salt. But I recognized him as a man very much like the Awans.

  According to court documents, Minhas stole $1.1 million, including $700,000 from American Muslims in a callous ploy that used their faith against them. He set up purported travel agencies that sold cheap tickets to the Hajj, the obligatory trip to Mecca. Instead of providing the tickets, he sent buyers letters saying Allah didn’t want them to go, but that there would be no refunds. “He blamed the whole thing on God, not on this thing that he did to us,” one victim recounted in court. Prosecutors said, “Minhas did not just steal the victims’ money; he stole their opportunity to satisfy an important religious obligation.” As one victim said, “I don’t know if we have another opportunity in our lifetime to. . .save that much money.”

  As a sentencing memo explains, Minhas used his knowledge of the travel industry’s central computer system, the Airlines Reporting Corporation, to exploit a “loophole in ARC’s electronic payment system for paper tickets to steal victims’ money by selling paper tickets that he then voided.”

  “He is, as the victims will tell you, an exceptionally smooth salesman,” prosecutors said. “When Minhas knew that his fraud had been discovered in March 2009, he fled the country for Pakistan,” where he had transferred $300,000 of his ill-gotten gains. “To add insult to injury, when the victims found him in April 2009, Minhas required that the victims sign a release of liability. In most cases, even after signing the release, victims still were not repaid.”

  A week before his trial in August 2014, Minhas provided receipts indicating that Muhammad Aslam, the previous owner of the travel agency, and had stolen the money. “The receipts were fakes and were intended to frame Aslam,” the government’s sentencing memo says. In his rebuttal, Minhas noted that he was part of “the FBI Citizen’s Academy working with the immigrant community.”

  * * *

  I sent a letter to Minhas in prison. A few weeks later, I received a response: “The name you mention in letter, these are the DEVIL family from Pakistan. Awan brothers are professional liars, for money they can sell their own mother. He made fake robbery case on me and seventeen others, and they are waiting for him to back to Pakistan after losing JOB in U.S. government,” it said. “Last time I seen Mr. Devil Awan in Pakistan 2010 about him and his father commit fraud with me and other landlords in Faisalabad, Pakistan . . .The way he used his resources through Congress to call U.S. Embassy in Islamabad and Pakistani officials, it was so bad.”

  Minhas became my pen pal, and he had much more to say.

  Minhas wrote: “In 2007, Mr. Awan family showed me dirty blood in their body, and from 37 acres they only transfer 1000 sqft, oh yes, only 1000 sqft, on my name, and I was third thirty-four percent partner.”

  “On Funeral day in Faisalabad,” after the car crash that killed Shabbir Ahmed and Imran’s mother, “many peoples were telling me, [Muhammad] Awan transfer land on his name by FRAUD, just why GOD gave him punishment.”

  Imran had filed a police report in Pakistan saying Minhas had stolen $40,000 in cash and a laptop from him. When I asked Minhas about it, he didn’t actually deny it, implying it was part of a war of retaliation against Imran. But he posed one question: how did Imran get so much cash to Pakistan? I had another: what was on the laptop—almost certainly a congressional one—that had wound up floating around a country that was, at that very moment, harboring Osama Bin Laden?

  Minhas said that when Muhammad Awan was arrested for stealing land from the farmers, he screamed in the police station: “You don’t know me, my SON (Imran) owns White House in D.C., you will learn lesson forever. . .I am king maker and I can change prime minister.”

  When Imran arrived in Pakistan to bury his mother and extort and frame others, a U.S. Embassy official met him at the airport at 2 a.m. and escorted him into town to the hospital where his father was being treated. Imran wasted no time using this as a display of his influence. “Imran Awan said to me directly these words: ‘See how I control White House on my fingertip, look [at] that guy (officer from U.S. Consulate was standing corner side in his father room in hospital). He was stand by inside airport waiting for me to welcome me in Pakistan.'” Imran bragged: “My boss called to Embassy.”

  What Minhas said next was shocking. His brother witnessed Muhammad give Rehman Malik, a former intelligence officer who went on to become Pakistan’s interior minister, a USB of data. “After Imran father deliver USB to Rehman Malik, four Pakistani [intelligence] agents were with his father twenty-four hour on duty to protect him. Oh yes, some Pakistani [intel] agents were with him all the time, as per order of Rehman Malik (former interior minister). FBI can verify with my teacher SON in Lahore and other family members,” Minhas said.

  I wasn't confident in the truthfulness of this claim, but it provided an explanation for other stories I’d heard about Imran traveling with an entourage of Pakistani agents. Minhas said that, despite the ease with which I identified him as a person with knowledge of the Awan family’s financial activities, the FBI had never contacted him as part of its investigation into the family.

  I spent months weighing whether to publish Minhas’ claims about the USB. It would be hard to either prove or disprove. One thing was clear: it was not as if the FBI had looked into this and found it to be false. It had no idea that this lead existed, just as it appeared blithely ignorant about so many others.

  I thought about the strange course that led me here, an unwitting actor at the center of sensitive international events. Imran’s M.O. for controlling Pakistani-Americans was, by now, a clear pattern: threatening violence against their loved ones in Pakistan.

  “My three U.S. citizen children are in Pakistan,” Minhas told me, and “Imran has corrupt police officer family members in Faisalabad.” I confirmed he was telling the truth about that, and that Imran was paying one such officer.

  If I published the story and the FBI still did nothing, Minhas’ family could be in danger. If they asked around Pakistan after my story ran, if recent experience was any guide, witnesses would already have been silenced. How had this choice fallen to me?

  I called the FBI and left a voicemail for the rookie FBI agent assigned to the Awan case, Brandon Merriman, but he never called me back. The Bureau never contacted Minhas.

  You had the IT aide to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was busted funneling data off congressional servers, undeniably displaying massive unexplained political power in Pakistan, and even claiming the power to change the president. The FBI—by then under the purview of Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions—knew all of this, and refused to even look into it.

  I ran the story. Witness intimidation simply couldn’t be rewarded. The silence needed to end.

  * * *

  While the American press for the most part ignored the Awan hap
penings, the Pakistani media was all over it. In my dealings with Gilani, I met Wajid Ali Syed, the Washington correspondent for one of Pakistan’s largest TV networks. A generous and gentle man, Wajid was politically savvy, but couldn’t understand why Congress, the FBI, and the American media apparently had so little interest in the case. We decided to team up, and Wajid boarded a plane to Faisalabad to find out more. In Faisalabad, everyone from neighbors to shopkeepers told Wajid about the remarkable sight of Imran traveling with his entourage of armed government agents and his constant boasts of mysterious political sway.

  Wajid discovered that the Awans’ land fraud scheme had not stopped after the death of Muhammad’s wife and the cutting out of his two partners. Amended incorporation documents Wajid obtained from the local courthouse revealed that Muhammad was now a seventy percent shareholder of the development company, while his second wife Gilani, his son Abid, and his daughter Adeela each owned ten percent.

  They subdivided the land they held into residential lots and began work on constructing the infrastructure to accommodate an entire town—in Pakistan, it's called a “colony”—which would need water lines, electricity, and a school.

  Among their buyers was one particularly large customer who would take an entire section of the town. Faisalabad Agricultural University trained thousands of students to set up the city’s textile industry and fuel the city’s growth as a hub for food processing and chemical production.