Obstruction of Justice Read online

  As the college expanded, it decided to build new housing for its faculty.

  The Academic Staff Association in charge of constructing the residences was led by Dr. Zafar Iqbal. When Wajid found him at his colonial-style residence on campus, Dr. Iqbal trembled with rage at the mention of the name Awan. He gave Wajid a copy of a signed agreement to sell land to house one hundred teachers.2 The faculty paid in full, and records show that in 2008, the deeds to half the land were turned over, but the rest were not. Just as the Awans never paid for the land when seizing it, now they had sold that same land without actually giving it over. Instead, they were trying to sell the same land again to others.

  For years, the faculty never got their land. Finally, they managed to obtain a court order restricting the developers from selling any plots without first resolving the issue, Dr. Iqbal said. Essentially, this meant a large portion of Imran’s assets in Pakistan were tied up. If he intended to flee to Pakistan to escape the investigation into his work in Congress, that made the plan untenable. In January 2017, the professors cornered Imran in Pakistan. Imran warned them of his “powerful political connections in Pakistan and in the U.S.” Eventually, he promised the professors they would finally get their deeds, and he flew back to Washington.

  Imran rounded up cash from the Capitol’s credit union and wired money to Pakistan—but it didn’t go to reimburse the professors for what they’d paid. Instead, some of it went to a cousin on the Faisalabad police force, Azhar Awan. On Facebook, Azhar posed with aviator sunglasses and a military-style uniform. When I asked Chris Gowen, Imran’s attorney, about the payments to the police officer, he said, “You need to understand how land purchases work in Pakistan and I don’t have time to explain it to you.” But I had a pretty good idea, and Dr. Iqbal saw it with his own eyes. Somehow, after the payoff to the cop, the court order was no longer being enforced.

  The rest of the funds went to Saif Ullah Awan, a cousin of Imran’s. Putting assets in his name rather than the Al-Moeen company’s name ensured Gilani would be cut out of the deal. In July 2017, deed records showed that the land was instead transferred to Saif, who Dr. Iqbal said “is Imran’s front man here.”

  Wajid took pictures of billboards encouraging would-be land buyers to call Saif Awan. He was selling the land out from under the university.

  THIRTEEN

  BACK IN THE HOUSE

  (EARLY 2017)

  After I published Samina Gilani’s allegations that Imran Awan had extorted her while using high-tech surveillance methods, the back-office bureaucracy of Congress got very nervous. Most of us manage to go through life without ever being accused of such behavior. What were the odds that the very people who were funneling data off the House network just happened to employ such tactics outside of work? It seemed a bit silly to say that they would prey on their own family, but wronging their high-profile employers would be the one red line they’d never cross. How could the Administration Committee have missed so much? Had they made a grave mistake with their lackadaisical response to the discovery of highly irregular logins to congressmen's computer accounts and major breaches of the House's IT rules?

  Jamie Fleet, Nancy Pelosi’s puppeteer, had an idea. He had previously told his Republican counterpart on the Administration Committee, Sean Moran, that neither side should talk to the media. But now he told concerned House officials that he was the source for all those stories in the Daily Caller. He was so on top of the Awan incident that he had discovered all these frightening patterns and leaked the information to me because it deserved attention. Everything, in other words, was under control, and no one needed to do anything more.

  It was a diabolical ruse. At that point, I had never spoken with Jamie.

  This was only one front in an all-out war to suppress the investigation. With the Awans banned from the network, Representative Wasserman Schultz launched a crusade, such as had never been seen before, to defend a lowly IT aide.

  In March 2017, three members of Congress—Wasserman Schultz of Florida, Gregory Meeks of New York, and Marcia Fudge of Ohio—set up a meeting with House Inspector General Theresa Grafenstine. Wasserman Schultz opened the meeting by saying of the Awans, “I told them to do all of it. They were authorized.” Theresa responded that the congresswoman hadn’t even heard what they were suspected of doing. When Theresa cracked open a massive binder of evidence and walked them through it, Representative Meeks slapped his thigh and laughed at her in the meanest possible way. “That’s all you got? You need a new job.” None of the members had a background in computer science, but for ninety minutes, they berated an inspector general who did.

  In a speech to a cybersecurity trade group in late 2017, Theresa said, “When I go to these scary meetings and I’ve got this five-inch binder of papers outlining a potentially criminal case, I go in to tell a member of Congress, ‘I think your staffer is violating the law,’ and having that person tell me, ‘I think you’re out of your mind,’ when I’ve got this five-inch binder, that’s a very tough conversation which I have had. The level of imbalance of power, I can’t even begin to tell you what that’s like. There were a lot of threatening, intimidating people that were very difficult to work with. . .They were screaming, screaming, pushing back with irrational things.”

  Representative Meeks made comments similar to Representative Wasserman Schultz’s to Politico, saying that he had authorized the Awans—even, apparently, relatives who weren’t employed by him—to do things with his data. It was an odd defense to say that IT aides can violate House rules if directed by a congressman. It also contradicted what House officials had stated in a February 3, 2017 memo which asserted that members of Congress had been unaware of the suspicious activity and had not consented to it. This premise set the stage for the Capitol Police to make clear that members of Congress were not targets of the investigation.

  Meeks told Politico, “I have seen no evidence that they [the Awans] were doing anything that was nefarious.” Actually, he had seen investigative findings that used that very word, "nefarious."1

  Meanwhile, Jamie was schmoozing the House’s top bureaucrat, Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko, who signed members’ paychecks and oversaw payroll and procurement. He even invited Kiko to his wedding in Gettysburg in April 2017.

  Kiko is a stodgy career Republican with the looks and demeanor of a small-town cop. Speaker Ryan appointed him as the House’s chief administrative officer in September 2016, after Kiko had a disappointing run as staff director to Representative Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi Committee. The CAO knew better than anyone that the Awans had committed fraud, because it was that office that uncovered the falsified $499 invoices.

  Kiko vacillated about how to approach the investigation. It was above his pay grade to defy members, particularly those like Representative Wasserman Schultz who served on the subcommittee that controlled his budget. Yet, he was deeply concerned by what I had found, not least that the Awans’ own stepmother had accused Imran of wiretapping and extorting her at a time when, if investigators had chosen a different course, he might already have been in jail. Still, as the weeks passed, he perceived no mandate and little direction from Republicans, and a crushing pressure from Democrats not to pursue the investigation.

  Kiko had told multiple people that Wasserman Schultz put her finger to his chest and said, “You’re a fucking Islamophobe,” adding that she’d invited the entire Awan family to her daughter’s bat mitzvah. “You will not so much as take away their parking spots,” she told him. Some of them also recounted that Kiko said Representative Wasserman Schultz blurted out an unusual detail, perhaps to emphasize the extent to which she trusted Imran: "I helped him with a land deal."

  It was part of Kiko’s job to be even-handed, and in every aspect of his job, he strove to manage the concerns of members of both parties. Accusations of favoring his own ilk hurt, given how groundless they were, and he went out of his way to avoid them. But when it came to the Awan case, he always heard a lot more from the
Democrats than the Republicans. Jamie often had more face time with the nonpartisan staff involved in the investigation than Sean did. While Jamie had made the handling of the Awan case a priority, Republicans on the committee derided Sean for routinely missing key meetings.

  Representative Wasserman Schultz was a senior member of the Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch, which controlled the budget for the Capitol Police, inspector general, and chief administrative officer. So, when it came to Democrats, she was better positioned than anyone to use the force of government to influence the investigation. But Republicans controlled Congress, so smart Democrats found pliable Republicans and used them. As a career Republican now serving in a nonpartisan position, Kiko was the perfect puppet. While Kiko had no power to order changes outside of the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer, he had the ear of the Republicans who did, and if initiatives were laundered through him, they’d be taken seriously.

  Wasserman Schultz pointed out publicly that it was Kiko’s office that was supposed to stop IT violations from happening in the first place. Such a long-running, and in retrospect, obvious, scheme having gone undetected for so long couldn’t possibly look good for his office, which had dozens of non-political employees whose job was to ensure congressional operations ran smoothly.

  Democrats had somehow found a way to turn a Democratic scandal into a failure of the Republican majority’s congressional administration. More confident and media-savvy practitioners would have seen that this was a stretch. The public would certainly assign the vast majority of the blame to Democrats. But these Republicans weren’t such practitioners, and there was more than a grain of truth to what people like Wasserman Schultz were saying.

  I had begun to see that the Awan scandal had been going on for many years and occurred because of a breathtaking lack of oversight. It turned out that every one of the Awans’ forty-four employers exempted the IT aides from background checks. The rules required them, but the CAO’s office was so disorganized that no one noticed. They didn’t even notice when Imran reported on his House financial disclosure forms that his wife did not have an income, when in fact she was on the payroll of the House itself—an obvious misstatement that could have led to scrutiny which would have uncovered additional issues.

  A few years earlier, part-time employees had been caught in a similar procurement scheme. The official response was to have all such employees sign a form pledging not to violate the rules. But when nearly half, or forty-five percent, of the staffers didn’t even bother to do that, the CAO didn’t notice, or at least didn’t do anything about it. Every year, the House IG’s annual audits warned that “ineffective controls over property and equipment” was a “significant deficiency.” And every year, it went unaddressed.

  While other IT aides presumably weren’t concealing Hezbollah-linked car dealerships, some simply never filed their House ethics disclosure forms. Some other systems administrators were simultaneously being paid as corporate contractors and direct employees; a brazen and unpermitted scheme that brought the contractor/employees lucrative federal benefits and extra pay.

  Though the CAO had eventually detected the procurement scheme involving pretending everything cost $499 so it was treated as petty cash, the CAO’s office had signed off on such vouchers for years. After it was discovered—though all assumed that the scale of the equipment scam was far greater than documented—they simply stopped counting after going back in time a short ways, largely because House administrators kept records in such an antiquated way that old records were difficult to review.

  The missed warning signs were so blatant, and the whole situation so egregious, that everyone involved had egg on their faces. Americans who already looked on Congress with contempt would have a field day with it if they knew. If Democrats feared that not protecting the Awans from criminal charges could lead to the retaliatory release of emails they’d rather keep secret, Speaker Ryan’s Republican officials came to believe that the Awan case would expose a different secret about the party in charge of the House: that they were morons.

  A defensiveness emerged; one that seemed to lead Kiko to believe that advancing Democrats’ desire to make the probe go away with as little trouble as possible was actually working in his own interest. Kiko pressed the Committee on House Administration to try to hire me away from the Daily Caller News Foundation. At the time, I took it to mean that he wanted an investigator on the inside who would actually get to the bottom of the Awan case. I am now certain that Kiko’s attempt to put me on the House payroll was actually designed to stop the public airing of what had happened.

  Kiko’s deputy, John Clocker, went to the Appropriations Committee to say that if the CAO had the budget for more auditors—specifically, if the budget for five staffers was taken from the IG and given to the CAO—then maybe they would have caught this stuff. In April 2017, he went further, proposing to a House Appropriations Committee staffer an idea to save some money: abolish the Office of Inspector General outright, with its fifteen investigators and auditors. It was an ask only a desperate person would make. The appropriations staffer knew doing away with an entity whose sole mandate was to make sure Congress wasn’t corrupt would be political suicide. “Are they high?” he said of the CAO.

  It wasn’t the last attempt to neuter the House IG. In July of 2017, the House Administration Committee sent a memo modifying the IG’s auditing powers, signed by both the Republican and Democratic committee heads. It contained the kind of accounting jargon a layman would not have been able to grasp, and assuming Jamie brought it to his Republican counterpart Sean and requested his approval, Sean would have likely had to rely on his characterization of what it did. In the accounting world, the provisions were significant and severely curtailed Theresa’s ability to do her job. If she had to stay on the payroll, they could pay her to sit in the corner and do little.

  The problem was that the most recent House-wide audit had caught numerous unrelated problems with the House’s finances, and the committee was at the time hoping the office would give them a chance to fix the problems before releasing the negative report. She refused to give the House a “clean audit” unless they restored her powers, and they did. But the situation was no different than any office worker who comes under the ire of one of her bosses. Sure, you might be able to hang on a little longer, but what was the point? The chain of command had no shortage of ways to make your life miserable if they wanted to. The writing was on the wall. Theresa was eligible for retirement and turned in her notice.

  Her departure should have made Jamie happy, except that Theresa leaving on her own accord posed another problem. Once on the outside, they had no control of her. And with a reputation as sterling as hers, if any of the facts of the Awan matter ever came into dispute, her word would rise above those of partisans like himself. Something had to change. Jamie ordered her not to tell anyone she was retiring—not even her own staff. He had a “communications plan” for managing the announcement. He said, as if it could explain the bizarre request, he wanted to throw her a party.

  What Jamie really seemed to want to do was make it appear that Theresa had been forced out of her job and left under a cloud. That would enable House officials to say, if it came down to it, that her work in the Awan case was compromised, and that she—rather than the culprits—should face the wrath of the House’s ethics system. Ironically, the pretext he settled on stemmed from her status as such a distinguished expert. As international chairwoman of the cybersecurity experts’ association, Theresa frequently gave speeches discussing the importance of ethics in government, best practices in technology security, and strategies for building these skills. Some of these addresses are online. A typical message is: “I want to be able to get out there as a woman and encourage children to enter STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields and really get out there and show that there are role models in the field who are women and minorities, to people who traditionally have not be
en drawn to this STEM field.” Nancy Pelosi’s operative seemed to take the position that this was dangerous stuff.2

  In one case, Theresa travelled to Malaysia to speak at a cybersecurity conference and sign a ceremonial statement attesting to the importance of ethics and IT security. The tab was picked up by that country’s version of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which House administrators knew because she properly disclosed it in compliance with House rules. After she announced her plans to quit, Jamie, the Democratic staffer, latched onto this with ferocity. In the hands of a skilled political operator, perhaps this could be twisted into something that could ride the current of the ongoing narrative about “foreign meddling” in American politics. “This is highly unusual,” he said. “She’s signing statements with foreign governments.” Jamie said she could be accused of violating the Logan Act, a law created in 1799 that essentially dealt with treason and which, if the claim wasn’t absurd, would make her the first person ever to be convicted under it.

  The juxtaposition was breathtaking. After a full year of knowing about readily provable violations of critical House rules—the falsification of financial records and logging into servers without authorization—by Pakistani immigrants who had financial ties to foreign government officials, the House had done nothing even though it had the full ability to enforce these rules on its own. The Awans’ lies year after year on their ethics disclosures—misstatements designed to hide troubling financial activity—were open-and-shut felony cases by themselves. Now more intensity was being put into punishing a speech about ethics paid for by a foreign government entity than was ever put into punishing Imran Awan for connecting to House devices from Pakistan or running a purported car dealership that took money from an Iranian fugitive.