Obstruction of Justice Page 13

  A call was placed to the legal counsel for the cybersecurity experts’ association, which possessed the contract for the speech that would be needed to pursue some sort of half-baked ethics charge against the House’s own investigator. We’ll subpoena you for it if we have to, the association was told. There will be hearings on this. Do you want to be dragged before Congress? You’re going to look really bad. The cybersecurity expert’s lawyer was no Michael Hadeed, and he wasn’t intimidated. Rather, he found the whole thing absurd. On what basis? What has she possibly done that you’d want to go through all this effort? Called out on it, Jamie seemed to realize he’d gone too far, and that this attempting to make hay out of such a non-issue was not exactly subtle. It reeked of desperation. Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly.

  Theresa retired from the House as scheduled.

  But what remained were her subordinates, a whole staff of investigators, some of whom had in-depth knowledge of the Awan case. The Capitol Police sought to silence them from talking about it. “Consider this your 6-E,” the police told them, invoking to the name of a form the FBI uses as a gag order in cases it is actively working. It was a ruse. There never was any FBI gag order; a sign that the Bureau wasn’t all that interested.

  In twenty years of documenting malfeasance in the halls of power, Theresa had never met a case so big that they’d rather get rid of her than have her findings see the light of day. This was that case.

  FOURTEEN

  LAPTOP IN A PHONE BOOTH

  (CAPITOL HILL, MAY 2017)

  The irony was that the Committee on House Administration top Democrat Bob Brady and his staffer Jamie Fleet didn’t even like Representative Wasserman Schultz, who many Democrats blamed for their defeat in the 2016 presidential election. Even if crafty messaging obscured it, when people said Russia “hacked the election,” that really meant one thing: Russia allegedly hacked the DNC’s emails, which revealed that Representative Wasserman Schultz had rigged the primary election against Senator Bernie Sanders. She’d used the party committee to take sides instead of running a neutral primary, demolishing grassroots enthusiasm on the party’s left flank and faith in the system among moderates. This sordid behavior took high ground away from Democrats and prevented Clinton—who cheated during a debate by receiving a question in advance from DNC honcho Donna Brazile—from invoking the sort of idealism at which Barack Obama excelled. For some Democrats, every time President Trump did something that infuriated them, and that was almost every day, they couldn’t help but think that if it weren’t for Representative Wasserman Schultz, everything might be different.

  Once, during a staged photo with Democratic lawmakers, Representative Brady was situated near Representative Wasserman Schultz. He pulled on an aide’s sleeve and asked to be moved. When the aide asked why, Representative Brady motioned to Wasserman Schultz. “Because of that fucking bitch,” he said, in full earshot of the congresswoman. Democrats knew that the Florida congresswoman pressured new lawmakers to put the Awans on their payroll and blamed her for putting their cybersecurity at risk again—at the DNC and in Congress. Doesn’t she ever learn, they thought. What Jamie knew, but few others did, is that even after the police banned the IT aides from the computer network, Representative Wasserman Schultz had kept Imran on staff. The House tried to help the Awans’ employers deal with the ban by providing free replacement IT workers, but Representative Wasserman Schultz refused to accept the money-saving service. She claimed Imran was now a “consultant” working on her “websites and printers,” which anyone could see seemed to involve network access. As if to jab her finger in the eye of investigators, she added Imran’s wife Hina to her staff as the probe was in full swing, even though she’d previously only needed one IT aide. When Hina moved to Pakistan soon thereafter, Representative Wasserman Schultz knew a suspect in an ongoing criminal cybersecurity investigation had left the country, seemingly for good, and removed her from her payroll. She kept paying Imran.

  Democrats saw how abnormal this was. How could someone who had just lost her high-profile job as chair of the DNC following a hack go out of her way to harbor to a criminal hacking suspect weeks later? Representative Wasserman Schultz’s recklessness was placing them and the investigation at risk. Her actions raised deeply troubling questions about how such an IT aide had her wrapped around his finger. If nothing else, her paying of Imran while he couldn’t be providing any meaningful service, at least without violating the police order, only underscored the suspicions about how this all began: a “ghost employee” scheme where Awan family members were being paid for no-show work.

  This was too much even for Jamie, who leaked the story to Politico that Representative Wasserman Schultz was still letting Imran work in the House. After all he had done to try to fix this mess, she was putting him in a position that he could and would not defend.

  Behind the scenes, Democrats were deeply concerned, but they sent signals to the media that there was nothing going on. The media took it as gospel. For months, news coverage of the Awan scandal was extremely limited and there were no arrests. What were the police waiting for?

  * * *

  By May 2017, I was banging my head against the wall. In any other time, my stories about the Awan scandal would have been front page news, but the media was obsessed with Trump. The fact that that the topic overlapped with two of the most discussed explanations for Clinton’s loss— cybersecurity and possibly foreign meddling—made the lack of pressure even more jarring. However, it was becoming clear that the media was not interested in pursuing facts wherever they might lead so much as working backwards from a single-minded focus on Russia; a conclusion in search of evidence.

  With every rock I overturned, it only got worse, but there was only so much time and too many witnesses to talk to. The army of reporters that would have ordinarily fanned out on the network of clues was conscripted elsewhere. That month, I got an email from one of the New York Times’ top political reporters complimenting me on my findings. “Keep it up,” he said. “We just don’t have the resources to do it right now because it’s all about Russia over here. . . but we may wind up wishing we had.”

  Around midnight, as I sat awake wondering why this hadn’t commanded a SWAT team caliber response from the government and how both Imran and Hina had apparently been allowed to leave the country after authorities had concluded that they’d hacked Congress, my phone rang. If it weren’t for the late hour, I would have taken it for a telemarketer and hit “ignore.” On the other end was a Capitol Police officer. I knew instantly that if he was coming to me, it was as a last resort and his investigation was being stonewalled. I was right, and from that point forward, thanks to a personal slight from Representative Wasserman Schultz, he’d be a major source for me. On that night, he had a story about something that happened a month before.

  * * *

  In early April 2017, the hallways of the House of Representatives might as well have been a representation of the post-election national mood. Desks and chairs were piled up precariously for janitors to come collect, the detritus of a chaotic transition of power. Many Democrats had been evicted and their replacements didn’t want to so much sit in the same office chair, it seemed. Or perhaps the exiled lawmakers didn’t want to give them the opportunity. But dwarfing the effects of Republicans’ electoral sweep was a nonpartisan tradition, with incumbents of both parties stopping everything to move to office space higher on the pecking order based on their seniority—closer to the Capitol dome, bigger, or with more windows. During the daytime, the buzz of activity in the halls diminished the scale of the upturned furniture, but at night, it was all that was left. That’s the scene that Imran Awan stepped into one night, two months after he’d been banned from the House network.

  Though forty-three members of Congress had fired him, Wasserman Schultz hadn’t, and that meant he still had the green badge that gave him twenty-four-hour access to the Capitol complex, which is how he found himself navigating the long passages
of the Rayburn building at such a late hour.

  The House buildings contain statues attesting to the nation’s history, but they also contain more mundane nods to the past in the form of cubicles that once served as phone booths. Now they are dirty alcoves, containing only a ledge with a hole where the phone line used to come in. During a hectic day of committee markups, it’s conceivable that a lobbyist might enter to use his cell phone out of earshot of rivals, though I’d never seen one do so. At night, there was no conceivable reason to; the vacant hallways afforded just as much privacy. It was one of these phone booths that Imran entered around midnight. He placed several objects on the ledge: a government laptop, a notebook that said “attorney-client privilege,” a letter to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, papers from the Pakistani government, and Xeroxed copies of his driver’s license and congressional ID.

  Imran set them down, then walked away.

  At 12:21 a.m., a janitor noticed the items and alerted the Capitol Police. According to a late-night police report, the prominently placed ID card copies served to make clear that this was not misplaced possessions they could helpfully return, but evidence in a criminal case. “Approximately three to four months ago, this officer was requested by [the sergeant at arms] as police presence of four individuals being interviewed,” the cop wrote after recognizing the name on the ID as one of the suspects. “It is unknown to the officer whether he is still employed.”

  The officer lifted the MacBook Pro’s lid and the screen lit up. In the center was a square icon with a username, and below it, the password field. The username: “RepDWS.”

  There seemed to be only two possibilities: Imran had stolen the congresswoman’s laptop, or she had given him the laptop in order to circumvent (and violate) the police's prohibition on Imran touching the network, which blocked his own computer from connected to the network. If it was the latter, Imran hardly seemed inclined to repay the favor since it was difficult to imagine he could have accidentally left such sensitive items in a room in which they couldn’t possibly have been out of sight. In fact, the phone booth was in a different building than the one that housed Wasserman Schultz’s office.

  His attorney, Chris Gowen, later said Imran was not in the building after hours that night; something that would be hard to justify for an otherwise unemployed “consultant” who wasn’t allowed to touch computers. That would mean he left it there sometime before six o’clock, and at no point in the next seven hours realized he had misplaced a trove of the most sensitive items imaginable and returned to get them.

  In court, Gowen also told the judge that Imran merely walked away from the items momentarily when the cops darted into the room and snatched them. That would mean Imran was skulking around House office buildings where he didn’t work at midnight.

  After finding it, the officer woke his supervisor at 3 a.m. and asked for guidance. He was told to file a report.

  Word got back to Representative Wasserman Schultz, who my police source told me was “frantic” and “not normal” for the next month. She screamed at the police. She was seen at a T.J. Maxx that weekend snapping at her daughter. She went to the House’s general counsel to get him to block police from looking at the laptop, but wasn’t satisfied with his answer, so she used campaign funds to hire his predecessor, Bill Pittard. Pittard had built his career on blocking the executive branch from getting their hands on congressional material, and now was in private practice with the law firm Kaiser Dillon. It was a highly unusual step since the House’s general counsel represents all members for free, and if he couldn’t help, that suggested it was because there were no legitimate legal grounds for doing so.

  Beginning six days after her laptop turned up in the phone booth, Wasserman Schultz’s re-election campaign paid Kaiser Dillon $41,000 for its work on the matter.

  This wasn’t a casual engagement. Wasserman Schultz was prepared to wipe out the bulk of her life’s savings to clean up the Awan incident. She racked up $59,000 in Kaiser Dillon fees that were payable by her personally, as opposed to the campaign. The most recent approximation of Wasserman Schultz’s net personal assets, according to ethics disclosures, places them at $106,000.1 Curiously, Kaiser Dillon agreed not to collect the money. On her 2017 ethics disclosure, she recorded it as a $59,000 “gift.”2 This is extraordinary. Understandably, strict rules prohibit corporations from giving massive gifts, whether in kind services or cash, to sitting members of Congress. None of the other 435 members of Congress reported a gift anywhere close to this size that year. Receiving it would require special permission from the Ethics Committee.3 Luckily for her, two of the members more tied up with the Awans than perhaps anyone but her—Ted Deutch and Yvette Clarke—were on the ten-person committee.

  Deutch was the ranking member.

  But her involvement didn’t end there. A source told me the congresswoman “stormed” into the U.S. attorney’s office. Her brother, Steve Wasserman, is a prosecutor in the Washington U.S. attorney’s office, the office handling the case. Steve, a board member of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys, tweeted about the ongoing case under the handle “fedpros,” dismissing it as the “non-case” against his sister.

  Representative Wasserman Schultz hadn’t fired Imran when presented with evidence of “unauthorized access,” nor when he was banned from the network. She hadn’t fired him when his wife fled the country. Now she still wasn’t firing him despite that even in the most innocuous of circumstances, losing a member's personal laptop would be a firing offense for negligence alone.

  And given the totality of it all, it was hard for a reasonable person to chalk this up to negligence. Imran doesn’t make mistakes, he plans ahead. “He cannot forget this stuff. He is very cunning, he does everything on purpose,” his second wife Sumaira told me. I took it as a warning shot: you think I’m not crazy? You think I won’t release your stuff if you don’t find a way to get me out of this? Try me. Think about what I have access to.

  With none of this public, and given the way the media had treated this case, if I reported it citing a single anonymous source, it would be ignored.

  Incredibly, there was a video. The officer pointed me to the video feed of a subcommittee hearing from earlier that week; one so obscure that it had only thirty-four views when I loaded it. After I reported on its context, the video would be on the nightly news. That’s because the dynamic that I knew to be true was plainly visible on Representative Wasserman Schultz’s face and audible in her voice, which seemed to be on the verge of cracking. You didn’t need to have been following the story to see that she appeared genuinely afraid of the police seeing what was on that laptop. A counterintelligence agent and profiling expert told me her mannerisms screamed of being the victim of blackmail.4

  It was a hearing of the eight-person appropriations subcommittee responsible for approving funding for Congress’s own internal operations. The purpose of the meeting was to decide how much money would be allocated for the Capitol Police in the upcoming year. Weeks before the force would become national heroes for two of its officers taking gunshots to save Majority Whip Steve Scalise from a politically-motivated assassination attempt, Representative Wasserman Schultz was on a warpath, with the leverage clear: slashing the budget of the police force whose mission was to protect Congress. She excoriated the police force’s plump and mustached chief, Matthew Verderosa, for tenuous grievances before concluding with her ultimate agenda. “I’d like to know how Capitol Police handle equipment that belongs to a member or staffer that’s been lost in the Capitol complex and found or recovered by one of your officers. What happens?”

  The chief responded: “You have to be able to positively identify the property and be able to establish ownership. If it’s part of an ongoing case, then there are additional things that need to be done.”

  Representative Wasserman Schultz became increasingly hostile and said a member’s equipment could only be taken if the member herself was the subject of an investiga
tion. The chief hinted that he believed Representative Wasserman Schultz might be falsely claiming a staffer’s laptop was actually hers.

  The chief said “If it’s subject to an ongoing investigation, there are additional things—”

  Representative Wasserman Schultz cut him off: “Okay, but not an ongoing investigation related to that member. If the equipment belongs to the member, it has been lost, they say it’s been lost, and it’s been identified as that member’s, then the Capitol Police are supposed to return it.”

  “It depends on the circumstances,” the chief said.

  She was daring him to reveal whether she was a potential subject of the criminal probe. “My understanding is that the Capitol Police is not able to confiscate members’ equipment when. . .the. . .member,” she said, drawing out the last word, “is not under investigation.”

  “We can’t return the equipment,” the chief replied.

  “I think you’re violating the rules when you conduct your business that way, and you should expect that there will be consequences,” Representative Wasserman Schultz barked. Then she abruptly turned off her mic, ending the hearing.

  A few months later, when the heat got to be too much, Representative Wasserman Schultz changed her tune. “This was not my laptop. I have never seen that laptop. I don’t know what’s on the laptop,” she said.5

  But hours after the exchange with the police chief Verderosa, she followed through on her threat and tried to unseat him from his own board. The appropriations panel reconvened to grill House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving, who is the House of Representatives’ top security official and a member of the board that oversees that police chief. Representative Wasserman Schultz told him it was inappropriate that the police chief had a vote at board meetings and underscored that Verderosa wasn’t in charge. “I’d like to know, sergeant, if you think that we should be looking at restructuring the way the board makes decisions so that we can establish a more direct line of accountability. . .At the end of the day, [the chief] doesn’t have a decision-making role.”