Obstruction of Justice Page 14

  The House and Senate sergeants at arms are joint supervisors of the police chief, with the Senate’s sergeant at arms serving as chairman of the board in odd-numbered years, like 2017. Representative Wasserman Schultz objected to this, saying, “We have had jurisdictional issues and a challenging time conducting oversight because of the structure of the Capitol Police Board and there being an indirect line rather than a direct line to us in terms of being able to hold the board accountable.” In essence, she suggested that the upper chamber should have no authority over the Capitol Police so that she could exert improper influence on individual cases by wielding the power of the purse. It was an extraordinary and irrational request made only days after Democrats were alleging that President Trump had obstructed justice by firing FBI Director James Comey.

  Up next on the budget-approval gauntlet that afternoon were the chief administrative officer, inspector general, and a few other entities. Though members ordinarily only talk with top-level officials, Representative Wasserman Schultz asked the CAO, who oversees cybersecurity, to put the House’s cybersecurity lead, John Ramsey, on the stand directly, and began grilling him for details about how much his office knew about her. “Are members monitored?” she asked. She had a follow-up: “If a member is using an application outside of the House infrastructure and the protection of the cybersecurity network, they’re in violation of House policy? So, members are not supposed to be using Dropbox?”

  “Not according to the policy,” Ramsey replied.

  Representative Wasserman Schultz, who knew more than any member of Congress in history about the perils of disregarding computer security warnings, defiantly boasted about violating House rules and blamed the House for not stopping her. “I am more than happy to admit that I use Dropbox. I have used it for years and years and years. It is not blocked. I am fully able to use it,” she said. “So, there is a vulnerability in our network,” she said. You need to “assure us that you take seriously protecting our network.”

  She asked how the CAO had made these rules known. Ramsey noted that his office had explained clearly to all House IT aides that they could not use unapproved programs that copied House data to third-party servers, including Dropbox. In an ordinary situation, a congresswoman might have been angry with her IT aide for failing to apprise her of that. But Wasserman Schultz was unwilling to question Imran’s conduct, no matter the evidence. “Safe to say that you have not” adequately communicated the rules, she said. She dismissed official memorandums to the relevant point people as “just lobbing email into a tech person’s inbox.”

  Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko interjected, apparently tired of the beating his lower-level employee was taking. “We do inform every IT person, IT administrator in every congressional office. If that’s not enough . . . ” he trailed off. His point was made.

  The next time Representative Wasserman Schultz spoke, another witness was on the stand: a woman who hobbled to the microphone on crutches. The video feed’s audio cut out during the ten-minute exchange. I asked the committee staff about that, and they responded by email that they’d had technical difficulties and would talk to the IT guy. I walked down the hall to my editor’s office and asked him if I was going insane. Was it possible that the exchange was important and that someone within Congress’ IT department was tampering with evidence; that it was not a coincidence that the audio for that exchange had cut out? I quickly concluded that that the strange goings-on in this case were making me paranoid.

  Months later, I discovered what was on the missing tape. The person being grilled was the inspector general, and the congresswoman was furiously attempting to pry information relevant to the Awan case. I tracked down someone who had been in the hearing room. That person still remembered the exchange. “I couldn’t believe what she was saying. Then the audio disappeared.”

  FIFTEEN

  MEDIA MALPRACTICE: SEE SOMETHING, SAY NOTHING

  The Democrats’ brazen public denial of the existence of any cyber breach was made possible by one thing: Republican leadership’s bizarre silence. They had agreed to call it a “theft investigation,” and didn’t say a word about the case. Was it any wonder that this was largely being ignored by the media, who assume that if even Republicans aren’t making hay of a Democrat scandal, there must be nothing to it?

  The fact was the Democrats had their act together and Republicans didn’t. Massive turnover among Republicans meant they had to rely on Democrats for institutional knowledge. The chairman of the Administration Committee, Representative Candice Miller, left office after 2016—at the peak of the Awan investigation—to become, of all things, a water authority commissioner in Michigan. At the same time, Speaker Ryan’s internal affairs fixer, Kelly Craven, had left to work for the Indiana attorney general and was replaced by Jennifer Hemingway, who was coming in cold to the Awan case. Even Chief Administrative Officer Kiko assumed his post only in September 2016. All of this meant that if someone wanted a comprehensive overview of the Awan investigation, he was forced to turn to Representative Bob Brady, who had been the top Democrat on the Administration Committee for many years.

  Replacing Representative Candice Miller was Gregg Harper, a Mississippi Republican who was elected more for his blandness than for Deep South, small government zeal. It was hard to dislike someone so harmless. The Committee on House Administration was perhaps the least prestigious panel in Congress, but one where a chairman could presumably avoid scandal and demonstrate his capacity for genial bipartisanship. It was perfect for him. Chairman Harper thought of himself as a “company man,” that company being the institution of the House of Representatives. Chairman Harper was so risk-averse that the prospect of a fifty-year old man consuming high-end tobacco products might as well have amounted to shooting heroin at an orgy. When he agreed to retain the committee’s top Republican staffer Sean Moran as staff director, Sean—who enjoys an afternoon cigar—took to hiding behind the bushes on the Capitol lawn, wearing gloves to keep the aroma off his hands lest he get in trouble.

  Neither Representative Brady nor Jamie Fleet, his top staffer, were so timid. Though the committee’s most interesting mandate is overseeing the integrity of federal elections, the FBI was investigating Representative Brady’s own campaign for paying his opponent $90,000.1 The opponent said he struck a deal with Representative Brady for a payoff in exchange for dropping out of the race. Two of Representative Brady’s campaign consultants pleaded guilty to making false statements since the payment was disguised in campaign finance records. A lobbyist put out a murder hit on one of the consultants in an attempt to prevent him from turning state’s witness to additional, unrelated political misconduct.2 And Jamie—who got his start as campaign consultant to Representative Brady—continued to pull political strings.

  During the summer of 2017, Chairman Harper’s office got a call from a Washington Post reporter working on an article about the Awan affair. Chairman Harper could assume the reporter had the Democrats’ spin, and now it was up to Chairman Harper whether to weigh in and shape the narrative. He was considering it until he got a message that made clear that this investigation was being controlled from on high. Tom Hungar, the Paul Ryan-appointed House general counsel who was the institutional lawyer for the House and represented it in cases against the executive branch, made it clear that Chairman Harper was not to speak to the media about the case.

  Hungar filtered all evidence before it got to the FBI or prosecutors to check if constitutional privileges like the “speech and debate clause” applied. Hungar had not screened any evidence from the Awan case until they were banned from the House in February, meaning that for months after key evidence was discovered, no FBI agents or prosecutors had seen it.

  While the House general counsel muzzled the Republican committee chair from speaking to the media, those rules did not seem to apply to the minority party, and Jamie Fleet, a mere staffer, spun freely to the media.

  The resulting article in the Washington Post cla
imed, comically, that the data illicitly uploaded off of congressional servers was “homework and family photos.” Readers were expected to believe that Imran Awan’s friend, Rao Abbas, broke into the House Democratic Caucus server to upload thousands of Imran’s eight-year-old daughter’s digital homework assignments, and then all the relatives logged in five thousand times to download them. Who knew elementary school was so rigorous these days? In reality, the folders being funneled to a third-party server had names like “credentials.” The IG report had even stated: “Based on the file names, some of the information is likely sensitive.” Don’t you think the inspector general would have reacted accordingly if the file names were all images and things like “Babysitters Club Book Report.docx”?

  Of course, the whole point of Dropbox is to sync files. Delete or change files from home and they’ll be modified or wiped from the remote computer too.

  It didn’t matter. Who knew whether Jamie had given the Post reporter, Shawn Boburg, the full IG report or only misleading excerpts. Either way, Boburg had been told a preposterous story, but it was the only story he had, so that’s what he went with.

  Boburg could not dispute the documented and consistent allegations by Imran’s closest relatives of threats of violence, witness coercion, and wiretapping—certainly relevant to a case involving unauthorized access to political data—so he diminished them with a single sentence: “The Daily Caller has painted an unflattering family portrait.” That’s one way to put it, I thought.

  Boburg interviewed Pat Sowers, one of the IT aides who had told me a number of sordid tales about the Awans, but chose to quote him saying, “It’s possible that everything was done innocently.”

  Sowers was also clear, as was every House IT aide, that the Awans could easily read people’s emails. But Boburg wrote: “The House network does contain lawmakers’ email, but a senior House official said IT workers could not access it unless lawmakers provided their passwords.” Even if this were true, one of the things the IG report found most suspicious is that the Awans were logging in as members of Congress themselves, making it obvious that they not only had direct access to members’ personal files, but seemed to be seeking them out.

  Running on the front page of the Sunday edition, the article included a posed glamour shot of Imran Awan dressed in his finest suit and staring meaningfully into the distance, taken by a Post photographer outside his lawyer’s office.

  One central element: the Post plucked a YouTube video-maker from obscurity and elevated him into a straw man. This nobody apparently speculated that Imran was a “spy” who was connected to Anthony Weiner and a web of other figures, yet there was “no evidence” of that, so therefore the entire Awan matter could be dismissed, the storyline went.

  The New York Times printed an article following a similar outline, essentially dismissing the case as a “right-wing media” conspiracy theory. Since no Republican would pick up the phone, most of the column inches went to defense attorney Chris Gowen, who induced the Times to print outright falsehoods, including that the police had never so much as interviewed Imran. Gowen later acknowledged to me that this was a false assertion, but the Times refused to correct its piece.

  It was beneath the Washington Post and the New York Times to write articles whose main thesis is “an unknown person on YouTube is wrong.” Even this crude rhetorical crutch, used to piggyback on a narrative about conservative “fake news” was fundamentally flawed. The YouTuber was a Democrat whose admittedly overblown and factually flawed interest in the story stemmed from Representative Wasserman Schultz rigging the primary against his favored candidate, Bernie Sanders, to whom public records showed he donated money. But these flagship publications didn’t care, calling him a “right-wing” troublemaker.

  From then on, the media could dismiss the Awan case as a “conspiracy theory,” or “discredited.” That meant law enforcement and politicians would feel no pressure to act. Republicans’ fear of the media blinds them to something Democrats know well: if you control the media, you control everything.

  SIXTEEN

  ARREST

  (JULY 2017)

  If you really want to know about someone, look at their trash.

  It’s a technique I’ve employed in past investigations, piecing together torn-up receipts like pieces of a maggot and diaper-themed puzzle; one that, assuming the trash cans are at the curb, is entirely legal. Samina Gilani told me that Imran was living in her old house in Springfield, and as the days passed with nothing but inaction from the authorities, I figured I had nothing to lose. Google Maps’ street view captured the name of the company on his trash cans, and I called up the company and found out what day pickup was. One hot July night when I didn’t need to be at work early the next day, I made the drive out to the house at 2 a.m. When I drove past, there was a yellow sports car idling in the driveway and a man who looked like Imran leaning into its driver’s side.

  I’d never been caught rummaging through trash before, and the prospect of it happening in this case, when the stakes were higher, made me nervous. I continued a block past his house, trying to go as slow as possible without activating the brake lights. There wasn’t another soul in sight, except one man sitting in a dark sedan who caused me to draw in a sharp breath as I saw him out of the corner of my eye.

  This was going to be a long night if I wanted to be certain Imran had gone to bed. Needing something to both kill ninety minutes and give me the energy to stay awake, I lit up a cigar. It was dead quiet. Lost in my thoughts about the case, billows of smoke met the humid air and drifted up until the white wisps got lost in the moon. It must have been twenty minutes later when it occurred to me that I never heard the car door close, indicating that the man in the car had never gotten out, as he would if he was a neighbor. I crept closer and confirmed he was still there. Jesus, I thought. It’s the FBI.

  I laughed to myself. At least if something went horribly wrong and one of the Awans tried to harm me, I’d be safe. Or would I? If the Bureau were serious about gathering evidence, it probably wouldn’t take kindly to my walking brazenly up to a house it was surveilling and taking evidence from it. Then again, I hadn’t seen any indication that the cops were performing anything more than a perfunctory investigation. This decision, which had to be made on the spot, came down to the question I’d been struggling with for months: were the authorities actually trying to get to the bottom of this case, or not? The fact that it was July 2017, and no one had been arrested for unauthorized access to congressional computers that had been fully documented in server logs for an entire year seemed to speak for itself. It seemed clear that the only purpose of the Capitol Police’s ownership of the case was to keep it under the control of the legislative branch and keep it quiet.

  Speaker Paul Ryan had told me the Capitol Police were getting “assistance” from law enforcement partners, and Andre Taggart, the marine who moved into Imran’s hurriedly vacated house, had told me the FBI had showed up to collect the hard drives he found. Out of caution, I hadn’t published in the Daily Caller what he’d told me months earlier because he didn’t send me a copy of the FBI agent’s business card as proof. But this, I figured, was as good as confirmation.

  The FBI, I assumed, would be relatively free of the political pressures that might hinder the Capitol Police, and the FBI certainly had far more technical capability and expertise than the Capitol cops. If the FBI was truly in charge, maybe I was wrong, and it was being taken seriously after all. I ruminated on everything that had happened. The FBI never talked to Rashid Minhas, let Hina leave the country, did nothing for the Awans’ stepmom Gilani, and hadn’t talked to anyone in Congress that I was aware of. Fuck it, I thought. If the FBI wanted evidence, it would have had it by now. I drove around to the other side of the house, carefully lifted the trash can’s lid, and hauled four large bags back to my car while a foul liquid dripped onto my baby’s car seat.

  When I got back to my apartment around 5 a.m., the sun was starting to come up
and I sifted through the trash, separating scraps of paper from meat juice-lined plastic packaging that had been baking in the July sun. The papers included tax documents with a Hispanic man’s name and a Social Security number on them, and legal documents with another guy’s name on them. After a shower, I decided to ignore these suspicious contents and published the story I’d begun work on months before about a lawyer threatening Taggart over electronics, including Blackberry phones and hard drives, that Imran had left at the house Taggart was renting. Now I was comfortable saying that the FBI was involved and in possession of that evidence.

  * * *

  That night, I received a phone call: Imran had just been arrested. After my story went online, he’d attempted to board the next flight to Pakistan.

  Imran had purchased a flight on Qatar Airlines departing from Dulles International Airport to Doha, Qatar, at 8:45 p.m., and then to Lahore, Pakistan. He purchased a return flight for six months later in January 2018. The FBI and Capitol Police jointly arrested him at the airport, where he had $9,000 in cash in a briefcase, two wiped cell phones, and a laptop with only one file on it: a resume that listed his address as Queens, New York. While the FBI was examining one of the phones, it lit up with an encrypted WhatsApp message from his lawyer, who seemed to anticipate his client’s arrest and was demanding to speak with him.

  Awan was taken to the Capitol Police station for processing, and the police confiscated the $9,000. He was arraigned the same day in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on one count of bank fraud. The charge was related to one of the most ancillary schemes I’d easily identified in the earliest days of my investigation: mortgage fraud. To me, it was a classic case of what cops call pretextual charges. When he bolted for Pakistan, the cops who were working on a long-term case had to scramble to stop him, and the open-and-shut bank fraud, however minor, was sufficient to hold him. He pleaded not guilty and was released without bail. The conditions were that he receive a GPS monitor, abide by a curfew of 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., and not leave a fifty-mile radius of his residence in Virginia. Imran was also ordered to turn over both his Pakistani and U.S. passports.