Obstruction of Justice Read online

  With an arrest, the media—however unwilling to do any investigating of their own—could no longer ignore the case, and after my 5 a.m. night and marathon writing session, I found myself all over national TV. Speaking from a small, dark booth in a “remote” studio in Washington, D.C., with a spotlight in my face, to TV network anchors in New York City, was a little disorienting. I was running on no sleep. But I looked straight into the camera and relayed what I’d been saying in vain for months: that the House had secretly caught the Awans hacking congressional servers a year ago, and there had been even more evidence of suspicious activity since. Surely Americans and fellow reporters must have seen that the FBI would not have been surveilling someone for committing mortgage fraud. It seemed like some of it might finally start to sink in.

  * * *

  The court case revealed the identity of the attorneys who had been pulling the strings for Imran behind the scenes for months: a team originally from Wasserman Schultz’s Miami area consisting of Chris Gowen, a bearded, hobbit-like man with a perpetual smirk on his face, and Jesse Winograd, an espionage law specialist. Gowen previously worked for the Clintons, serving both Bill and Hillary Clinton face to face as a personal aide and following them from Hillary’s Senate office to her 2008 presidential campaign and the Clinton Foundation. He says he specialized in fetching them Diet Cokes.

  He also had a track record of working on straight-out-of-Hollywood cases like this one. In the 1990s, a journalist-turned-lawyer named Steven Donziger played on liberal sentiment to conduct a multi-billion scam that the Wall Street Journal called the “legal fraud of the century.”1 The case involved an area of the Amazon rainforest where the oil company Texaco had drilled. As the Journal wrote, “Donziger sniffed the potential windfall of a media-ready environmental ‘disaster’ and sued the company for $113 billion. He enlisted all manner of celebrity helpers,” speaking eloquently about the plight of poor indigenous people and of polluted waters. The problem is that none of the rhetoric applied to the situation at hand. Texaco had cleaned up its oil pits after it was done drilling in that area, and even the experts hired by Donziger found no “scientific evidence that people in the. . .area are drinking water contaminated with petroleum.” But Donziger sensed that a third world jury might be eager for a cash grab against a U.S. corporate giant, and that it had all the markers of a feel-good story. “All this bullshit about the law and facts, but in the end of the day, it is about brute force. . .This is not a legal case, this is a political battle that’s being played out through a legal case,” he said privately, adding that “the judges are really not very bright.” He falsified evidence and bribed a judge in Ecuador to rule in his favor. A U.S. court reviewing the judgment Ecuador awarded found that Donziger and his team “wrote the [Ecuadorian] court’s judgment themselves and promised $500,000 to the Ecuadorian judge. . .The wrongful actions of Donziger and his Ecuadorian legal team would be offensive to the laws of any nation that aspires to the rule of law.”

  Gowen was just a child when the case in Ecuador began, but he served as the lawyer advocating for Donziger when a U.S. federal court reviewed the way the massive judgment was secured. And it’s easy to see why. “Donziger is intelligent, resourceful, and a master of public and media relations. An extensive public relations and media campaign has been part of his strategy from early days, and it continues. Among its objects has been to shift the focus from the fraud” against Texaco to feel-good platitudes designed to play toward the emotions of environmentalists, the U.S. judge wrote. By all appearances, like Donziger, Gowen was as much a media fixer as a lawyer, preferring the microphone to the courtroom.

  Gowen described Imran’s arrest as “clearly a right-wing media-driven prosecution by a United States Attorney’s Office that wants to prosecute people for working while Muslim.” Keep in mind, the family was banned from the House computer network before I ever heard of them because of an investigation spurred by Democratic tips and pursued by a Democrat-selected inspector general. The acting U.S. attorney for D.C. was still an Obama holdover. And, of course, a huge portion of IT professionals are from India or Pakistan, which no one bats an eye at because most don’t make “unauthorized access” to congressional servers or lie on seemingly every government form they’ve ever filled out. These are the kind of things any diligent judge would see if presented the facts.

  But Gowen’s strategy was to play to the Trump Derangement Syndrome that had taken over the media. The statement he released to the press following Imran’s arrest was completely insane:

  The attacks on Mr. Awan and his family began as part of a frenzy of anti-Muslim bigotry in the literal heart of our democracy, the House of Representatives. For months we have had utterly unsupported, outlandish, and slanderous statements targeting Mr. Awan coming not just from the ultra-right-wing “pizzagate” media but from sitting members of Congress. Now we have the Justice Department showing up with a complaint about disclosures on a modest real estate matter. To an extent, the situation speaks for itself. Mr. Awan’s family is presently staying with extended family in Pakistan because he and his wife were both abruptly and unjustly fired, leaving them without a reliable source of income to pay typical U.S. living expenses, and because extremist right-wing bloggers were beginning to harass them and their children—even going to their children’s schools. Mr. Awan has stayed in the U.S. to earn some income to manage this situation as best as possible. He attempted to travel this week to see his family for the first time in months. The government had been informed he would travel and had stated no objection.

  Gowen worked as a fact checker for Bill Clinton’s memoir and taught a course on legal ethics at American University Washington College of Law.2 Yet some of Gowen’s statements appeared to be simply made up. If anything, the media was ignoring the story—certainly no reporters had gone to the children’s schools. The basic witnesses I located had never been interviewed by any law enforcement, and prosecutors seemed unaware of almost everything until I reported it. Despite that, Gowen claimed the FBI “started this giant investigation that’s probably the most thorough, exhaustive investigation in the history of this country.”

  Citing Gowen, the Associated Press said Imran’s family was forced to live “in squalor” in Pakistan because of the investigation, making no mention of the fact that Imran and his wife had each earned $165,000 a year for a decade and owned at least four homes. Imran himself had told the Congressional Federal Credit Union bank clerk that he wired the money to Pakistan for a $300,000 funeral for his father, which a third attorney working with Gowen and Winograd, Aaron Page, doubled down on, explaining to reporters that it was an “elaborate funeral.” Who would spend $300,000 on a funeral for a janitor-turned-con man, while living relatives resided in squalor? Worse, if the Awans were so destitute after the House paid them $7 million, to whom was all that money going?

  Representative Wasserman Schultz fired Imran Awan only after the arrest. She claimed that she knew he was leaving the country and was OK with it, and that her chief of staff had filled out a form placing him on unpaid leave while he was gone. The truthfulness of this is dubious. Over the years, Imran had repeatedly gone to Pakistan for months without ever going on unpaid leave, including his recent trip from September to December of 2016. Why start withholding his pay while he was seven thousand miles away now?

  While Gowen used the media to avoid accountability with an angle designed to play to the narrative about “fake news,” Democrats hid behind identity politics. Representative Wasserman Schultz told her hometown paper “He’s not my staffer. He no longer works for me. And when he was arrested, I terminated him. I kept him on the payroll during the time that he was not arrested and not charged with anything. And that was because, as I said, that I was concerned about the violation of his due process rights and also that there were racial and ethnic profiling concerns.” Even after the arrest, she said Imran was being “persecuted.”3

  Gowen joined in with cartoonish rhetoric so overblown th
at it seemed astonishing that anyone could fail to see he was trying to divert attention from the facts. He said the only reason conservative media would be interested in an apparent government cyber breach was the following: “Whoa, we got Pakistan, we got female, we got Democrat. Let’s roll.’ ”4

  Even if journalists couldn’t, the people closest to the case knew how cynical and Orwellian this was. We got Pakistan? Syed Ahmed, Samina’s cousin, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “That’s a completely insane statement. It has nothing to do with their being Muslim; they are bad people. What they have done to their mother, their father—they are not Muslims at all, if they prayed five times a day they would not do these things,” he said. “If some Congress members are saying they are being picked on because they are Muslim, it’s a joke.”

  Andre Taggart, who was threatened over the left behind Blackberries and computer equipment, said, “With respect to this situation, political affiliation is irrelevant. What people need to understand is this is real. It’s not like right-wing wingnut-crazy making stuff up. This is coming from a black Democrat United States Marine that just wants to get these motherfuckers locked up and exposed, and the people that facilitated them should also be locked up as far as I’m concerned. He, his wife, his brother, they’re all working down there—there’s no way they could do this without help. If we can drag Trump and his wingnuts through the mud for the Russia influence that they are having, then it’s only fair that we also expose this shit.”

  We got a woman, let’s roll? While liberal feminist protesters gathered on the National Mall in pink “pussy hats,” three Muslim women in Imran’s life (you’ll see who the third one is soon) said he had kept them “like a slave,” held them “in captivity,” or controlled them with death threats. A fourth, another mistress of Imran’s, called the cops after he had apparently beaten her. Over in Pakistan, the widow of his father’s business partner was similarly threatened. Could anyone genuinely believe that Republicans targeted Representative Wasserman Schultz and invented the Awan scandal because of her sex?

  With sexual harassment charges and the “me too” movement rocking the nation, Nancy Pelosi said, “Predators have long counted on doubt and intimidation to stop survivors from coming forward. No more! Survivors, we stand with you.” The evidence that Imran Awan abused women included at least five police reports, three restraining orders, and two lawsuits. I emailed every congresswoman who employed one of the Awans and sent them the official records documenting the abuse allegations leveled against Imran. I asked for a response. Only two bothered to reply.5

  If identity politics had been rotting the brain cells of Americans for decades, this case might be the moment it finally jumped the shark. You had someone who evidence suggested hacked politicians, evaded taxes, abused women, preyed on the vulnerable and even commissioned police brutality—all signature Democratic issues—and Democrats were defending him? The “discrimination” soundbites got play, while public police reports and lawsuits showing objectively concerning conduct were ignored. With Americans’ new Twitter-length attention spans, most people, including the pliable liberal media, never got that far. I wondered: If Watergate took place in this hyper-partisan, Twitter-addled, “fake news” era, how would it play out?

  * * *

  On August 24, 2017, the indictment was broadened to four felony counts, and added Imran’s wife Hina as a defendant. Yet it was not the expanded indictment I anticipated; one that would focus on the misconduct the FBI had officially known about since December 2016. Instead, it just added a few more financial charges involving what obviously appeared to be the Awans’ effort to flee that investigation. “Defendants AWAN and ALVI did unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly conspire, combine, confederate, and agree with each other to commit offenses against the United States,” including bank fraud, false statements, and unlawful monetary transactions, the indictment said.

  Even when it came to these money moves, it seemed to go out of its way to paint an incomplete portrait. Prosecutors hadn’t even charged all the behavior laid out in the FBI affidavit upon which the arrest warrant relied. The affidavit spelled out how Hina pretended to have a medical emergency that required liquidating her House retirement account, and how Imran had impersonated his wife to take out a home equity loan that was to be used to renovate his house. It related how Imran told the bank employee the wire was for a $300,000 funeral, then instructed the employee to hold while he Googled another excuse they’d have to accept. It also spelled out how the pair evaded taxes on rental income and deceived the bank to hide it: they submitted a false lease saying Hina’s mother lived there, when in fact, it was being rented to the couple whom I’d spoken to who said that Imran ordered them not to cooperate with police.

  Anyone reading the indictment would have no idea that the proceeds of the alleged bank fraud were wired to Pakistan, that Hina snatched her kids out of school and flew to Pakistan with all her possessions and a suitcase of cash shortly afterwards, and that Imran was apprehended attempting to flee the country. To dance around these facts, the charges did not focus on the fact that the loan money wasn’t used for its required purpose of home improvements. Instead, the charge focused on one minor matter: that the suspects said the home was their primary residence rather than an income property. If all someone knew was the facts presented in the indictment, it seemed like a pretty boring case. The U.S. Attorney’s office didn’t even send a press release. There was still no mention that this couple had been busted making unauthorized access to congressional servers, that police said key evidence disappeared afterwards, that a congresswoman’s laptop turned up in a phone booth, or that a cache of missing House computer equipment was found in an elevator shaft.

  But if Democrats had somehow managed to obscure the incredible facts at the heart of this case, something seemed to be on the horizon that would make that harder, and it involved the word fugitive. Hina was still in Pakistan when she was indicted. The FBI affidavit stated that the Bureau did not believe she would return to the United States:

  On March 5, 2017, your Affiant, along with agents from the FBI and US Capitol Police, approached Alvi at Dulles International Airport, in Dulles, Virginia. Alvi was about to board Qatar Airlines, Flight 708, to Doha, Qatar, on her way to Lahore, Pakistan. Alvi was with her three children, who your Affiant later learned were abruptly taken out of school without notifying the Fairfax County Public School System.

  Alvi had numerous pieces of luggage with her, including cardboard boxes. A secondary search of those items revealed that the boxes contained household goods, clothing, and food items. US Customs and Border Protection conducted a search of Alvi’s bags immediately prior to boarding the plane and located a total of $12,400 in US cash inside. Alvi was permitted to board the flight to Qatar and she and her daughters have not returned to the United States. Alvi has a return flight booked for a date in September 2017. Based on your Affiant’s observations at Dulles Airport, and upon his experience and training, your Affiant does not believe that Alvi has any intention to return to the United States.

  This was beyond bizarre; a smoking gun indicating that from the beginning, these defendants had been protected by the FBI. Agent Brandon Merriman had tailed her to the airport because of all the evidence against the Awans in the House of Representatives, found an illegal amount of hidden cash on her (which provided a pretext for an arrest as much as the mortgage fraud did), she’d refused to answer his questions (as prosecutors later revealed), and he let her board the flight anyway, then filed paperwork saying he was sure she’d never return. Why did Merriman bother chasing her to the airport if he had no intention of stopping her? It almost seemed as if the FBI was escorting her out of the country and into obscurity rather than pursuing a criminal case.

  But if Representative Wasserman Schultz’s systems administrator, which Hina Alvi had been, became a fugitive in Pakistan, her protestations about how the Awans had been targeted by Islamophobes—meaning presumably the Capitol Po
lice, the inspector general, and federal prosecutors—would be a tough sell to the public.

  Hina retained a separate Washington attorney from Imran, hiring a small-time criminal defense lawyer in a two-person practice. That raised the possibility that her legal defense might be pitted against his.

  The arraignment for the expanded charges was set for September 1, 2017: the Friday before Labor Day weekend, when many reporters would be off work and Americans would be too busy enjoying the holiday to pay attention. But Hina was not present at the arraignment.

  Imran had not even been held on bail, but Gowen requested that the GPS monitor on his client be removed. As for the 50-mile restriction on his movements, Gowen said Imran had been driving for Uber and “the 50-mile radius makes that hard. . . if he rejects a call he will lose his job.” In the compact D.C. region, a 50-mile Uber ride would be rare, so that seemed to make little sense.

  Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Marando, a career prosecutor with gray hair and mopey eyes, warned the judge that Imran was a severe flight risk. “From day one there was a pattern of flight. It began September 2016. . . a pattern of transfers to Pakistan, hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said. As for his wife Hina, “She gave every impression to the government that she was leaving the country with no intention to return,” Marando said. “Imran had what the government would characterize as a one-way ticket to Pakistan,” he added, noting that his date of supposed return on his roundtrip ticket didn’t match with his wife’s.