Obstruction of Justice Page 16

  By September 13, 2017, the prospect of Hina’s return seemed to become even more unlikely. Even as Representative Wasserman Schultz painted Imran as a choir boy, his own wife and fellow congressional aide said otherwise. Hina turned against her husband, filing a lawsuit against him in Pakistan alleging fraud and an attempt to control her by threatening her loved ones in Pakistan with “dire consequences.” By now, Imran’s modus operandi of controlling people with the threat of violence against their loved ones overseas was familiar, right down to the wording that might as well have been Imran’s catch phrase: “dire consequences.”

  “My husband Imran Awan, son of Muhammad Ashraf Awan, committed fraud along with offence of polygamy,” Hina said in the lawsuit. It named Imran’s secret, second wife, Sumaira Siddique. The fraud to which she objected was not what occurred in the U.S. House of Representatives, or even that Imran had a second wife, but that he had falsified marriage paperwork and lied about it. “A few months ago I got apprised of the fact that my husband has contracted second marriage secretly, fraudulently and without my consent with Mst. Sumaira Shehzadi alias Sumaira Siddique, Daughter of Muhammad Akram r/o Township Lahore. The second marriage of my husband is illegal, unlawful and without justification,” it said.

  I learned about this soon after it happened in a way that any competent investigator could have matched: I got a Google Alert notification that Pakistan’s ARY news site had obtained and reported on the filing. Following standard journalism protocol, I emailed the link to Gowen and asked for a comment. Gowen denied the undeniable without bothering to explain, writing: “totally false . . . . You are a liar, a trump pawn and a very bad person.”

  Was he just trying to get me to print a statement that would signal to liberal-leaning journalists and readers that they should disregard my reporting? Or was he claiming ARY had fabricated the document? To cover all our bases, Wajid, the Pakistani correspondent I was working with, set out to obtain the lawsuit from Hina’s Pakistani lawyer, who promptly answered the phone and promised to send the document in full in a few days. But he never followed up, and when Wajid approached him again, something had changed, and he seemed disinclined to cooperate. Wajid had a colleague go to the Lahore courthouse and take pictures of the full filing, which contained allegations of violent threats that weren’t included in the ARY article. In the court filing, Hina’s Pakistani lawyer wrote:

  Respondent has contracted a second marriage on 17-08-2015 with one Mst. Sumaira Shehzadi alias Sumaira Siddique. . . without obtaining prior permission. Rather he mentioned himself as bachelor in. . . marriage certificate, he falsely declared that he has no wife or biological children at the time of contracting second marriage. This act of the respondent was shocking for the complainant and she asked the respondent about his second marriage on which he became furious while admitting the same and said he has no need to obtain permission from the complainant. . . .

  He further said furiously that the complainant has no right or power to restrain him from second and even third marriage. Furthermore, the respondent threatened the complainant of dire consequences. He also threatened to harm the lives of family of the complainant if she intervenes into the affairs of the respondent.

  When Hina’s arraignment rolled around, the question was whether she would be there—and if she was, whether prosecutors would induce her to turn witness against her husband.

  * * *

  The next court date was the day before the Columbus Day weekend in October 2017, another date selected to ensure minimal media attention. But the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse is only three blocks from the Capitol, and all the major networks were staking out the lobby. A lone CNN producer, like a sheep accidentally separated from the herd, approached Gowen outside the courthouse, asking a clumsy question about the Awan case. The rest of the media, it turned out, was hoping to confirm vaporous, and false, rumors about the seating of a grand jury to investigate connections between Russia and Trump associates. Imran walked right by the press, unnoticed.

  In the second-floor hallway, I spied Hina’s attorney, Nikki Lotze, who’d ignored my many emails about how Imran “furiously” threatened to “harm the lives” of Hina’s loved ones if she “intervenes into [Imran’s] affairs.” She was alone with no sign of her client. I asked her about Hina’s allegations against her husband regarding fraud and violent threats and she stared at me blankly. I said Gowen indicated there never was such a lawsuit and asked her if that was true. She launched into a halfhearted screed about Islamophobia, but what she was saying made no sense, and she seemed to know it. She simply wasn’t as good at this as Gowen. I sighed. “Look, are you saying your client didn’t say that her own husband controlled her with death threats?”

  “I don’t see how that’s newsworthy,” Lotze finally said.

  As I took my seat in a windowless courtroom on the second floor, other than myself and one television producer, there were no media in the courtroom. Imran was there, and at the last minute, the double doors opened and Hina appeared.

  She and her husband avoided eye contact and did not speak to each other, but Imran handed her an envelope, which she put in her bag. The two indicted congressional aides were seated directly across from each other at the defense table. They looked down, to the left, or to the right—anywhere but at each other.

  The joint appearance was the opening to what would assuredly be a long and dramatic sequence of court battles. I never would have imagined it would be one of the last times they’d appear in court.

  The court case had been assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan, a Jamaican-born justice nominated to the bench by Barack Obama in 2013. Around the time she received the Awan case, Chutkan was also assigned the Fusion GPS case involving the opposition research firm hired by the DNC to create the “dossier” tying, on the flimsiest evidence, Trump to Russia. Fusion put the wife of top DOJ official Bruce Ohr on its payroll and used the husband to feed the information to the FBI. Fusion GPS then used that to convince newspaper reporters that there were newsworthy government actions supporting connections between Russia and Trump. Chutkan recused herself from the Fusion GPS case because of ties between the firm and her previous legal work.6

  After Hina pleaded not guilty, Judge Chutkan asked her to turn over her passports, and Lotze handed over a U.S. passport. Prosecutors asked if she had a Pakistani one, as Imran did. Hina shook her head “no.” Lotze leaned in and then spoke. “She does have one, your honor, but it’s not here.” Hina had returned from Pakistan for the express purpose of turning herself in, the claim went, but hadn’t brought one of her passports because it was “expired.” Prosecutors knew that both she and Imran would only have to go to the Pakistani embassy to obtain replacement foreign passports and leave the country. Judge Chutkan wasn’t bothered. “Try to make arrangements to have it sent to the government,” she said. Hina was released with no bail—not even an ankle bracelet monitor. With Hina’s arraignment complete, Gowen wasted no time getting to the point: Hina’s return meant that Imran, too, should get his GPS removed. He was a family man, his attorney argued, and wouldn’t try to flee because he loved living with his wife.

  I was starting to see that there were a few reasons why Hina would return. First, Imran might have forced her to come, because having a fugitive as a co-conspirator didn’t help his case, nor the Congress members' political futures. Second, prosecutors could have given her immunity to testify against others. Third, Hina had reason to be confident that despite all the evidence gathered in the House, she’d never see the inside of a jail cell.

  Even as Gowen told the judge that Hina’s presence was enough to keep his client in the country, he acknowledged that the pair were currently staying apart “in a one-bedroom apartment and then also a house.” He asked the judge for permission to let the couple sleep separately or together. The Pakistani lawsuit showed that even in Pakistan, the couple stayed in separate towns. But prosecutors never told the judge about that weeks-old Pakistani filing, which indi
cated that Imran’s codefendant could be in danger and operating under duress, as well as that Hina was a prime candidate to be a government witness. Instead, prosecutor Marando conceded that Imran was not a danger to the community.

  “Why should I keep him on the GPS monitor?” Judge Chutkan asked.

  Marando explained that Imran was taking elaborate measures to cover his tracks. “I cannot say what goes on in the mind of an industrious person who wants to leave the country,” he said. “But he’s traveled to Pakistan numerous times and made numerous wires of significant amounts of money for the purchase of property, potentially to set up a life there. He had on him two cell phones [and a] laptop. One cell phone was wiped two hours before we arrested him. He was taking active measures to [evade] our investigation.”

  He continued: “There wasn’t much on the laptop, but there was a resume with an alias in Jackson Heights, Queens.”

  Even when the prosecutor acted like a prosecutor, his argument belied a complete unfamiliarity with the evidence. The presence of a resume with a Queens address was notable. Representatives Meeks and Clarke were from nearby, as was a relative to whom Imran had sent money, Saif Rao; and Jackson Heights, Queens, harbored a notorious false identity market for immigrants. But the so-called alias was simply “Alex Awan,” the innocuous American nickname any witness could have told Marando Imran often went by. With this kind of grasp on the facts, it was impossible for Marando to identify problems with the defense’s logic.

  With the hearing about to adjourn, Gowen jumped up out of the blue to address the judge with what seemed to be his main objective: “We do expect there being an attorney-client privilege issue in this case. . . . What occurred is a backpack from my client was found. . . there was a note that said ‘attorney-client privilege’ and a hard drive. We feel very strongly about this.” He asked to approach the bench, and static white noise blasted out of speakers hidden behind ornate wooden clocks that had no hands.

  Anyone who had read my reporting would realize that this was Representative Wasserman Schultz’s laptop. The facts tracked exactly with the text of the police report I’d published months earlier, but which had gone entirely dismissed by the media, as if they thought I’d made it up. I thought: did they really think I made it up, or did they just prefer to ignore it?

  Now, assuming the judge bought the argument, it would be up to Imran to decide whether prosecutors would see what was on Representative Wasserman Schultz’s laptop. The privilege argument was ludicrous, akin to claiming a killer could place a Post-It note that says “attorney-client privilege” on a gun before firing it and then claim prosecutors couldn’t use it as evidence. For months, the court case would be postponed, with prosecutors saying they were haggling about whether prosecutors could look at the laptop.

  Of course, to the judge, this was just some case about bank fraud. And if I hadn’t spent months prying facts loose, no one would have known that a congresswoman’s laptop was placed in a phone booth by a hacking suspect, or even that there was any cybersecurity issue in the House.

  With that, the defendants left the building—separately. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear, does it make a sound?

  SEVENTEEN

  INSIDER THREATS

  There was an elephant in the room that every House official who discussed “procurement irregularities by IT support staff” went to great lengths to avoid: support staff didn't have the power to do anything with congressional funds; bosses signed off on all expenditures. The nature of many of the procurement schemes tended to implicate chiefs of staff and possibly congressmen. The role of a tech person was merely to place an order for equipment at the request of a chief of staff, and then, when it was received, have the chief sign a form acknowledging receipt and authorizing payment. The point was inadvertently driven home by Democrats who sought to downplay the Awans’ stature, as members such as Ted Lieu of California had done, falsely claiming that the Awans were corporate contractors or were not really on their staff, or—more accurately— referring to them as unimportant support staff. Clearly such people don’t have the authority to spend taxpayer money. Only the members and the chiefs of staff could do that.

  That meant, in the offices where the Awans had purchased unusual amounts of equipment, the chiefs of staff must have known they were signing off on things the office didn’t need. The Awans had accumulated massive stockpiles of high-end equipment, which investigators had photographed sitting unopened in boxes and which the February sergeant at arms memo said was “being stored at unknown locations for long periods.” In some cases, it was delivered straight “to the homes of some of the employees.” There was little doubt that this equipment was disappearing. Before he knew any details of what the House had found, Abid’s acquaintance Syed Ahmed told me Abid was sending iPhones to Pakistan. Even though they’d have no reason to know some of it went abroad, why did managers of these budget-strapped offices think they were purchasing so much equipment that they had no immediate need for and that they never saw?

  Even if the equipment itself seemed prosaic enough, chiefs of staff were signing off on forms that said things that clearly made no sense, describing high-end computers as costing only $499, or iPhone warranties as costing as much as the phone itself. At best, these offices were being run by incompetent and fiscally illiterate managers. Alternatively, it suggested that there were kickback schemes going on between several members or chiefs of staff, beyond the one that Representative Clarke’s chief of staff Wendy Anderson suspected had taken place in that office.

  Any autopsy of what had occurred could not avoid the conclusion that the Awans’ forty-four Democratic employers—including some of the most vocal Russia hawks who screamed about Russian hacking of DNC computers—had acted, at best, with extreme negligence when it came to their own IT. They put a twenty-year-old and a McDonald’s employee on their payrolls as their sole systems administrators, knowingly allowed people who were not on their payroll to access all their data, and exempted these sensitive positions from standard background checks that would have caught major red flags.

  After the arrest, the Awans’ lawyers made it abundantly clear that no trial could proceed in court without these issues being laid out in detail.

  Abid Awan’s attorney, Jim Bacon, told the Washington Post: “In a fluid situation, you do what you’re ordered to do.” Any missing equipment, Bacon said, “disappeared after it was brought to the folks who were demanding it. . . . It sounds to me like there’s a lot of scapegoating here.”1 The Post printed this as if that made the whole thing a non-story instead of what it was: the remarkable assertion that members of Congress “ordered” staff to commit fraud, and that their top staff were making off with equipment. One of Imran’s lawyers, Aaron Page, told me on the topic of falsifying invoices: “This is what experienced members of Congress expect: to expedite things, they adjust the pricing.” He couldn’t explain how it “expedited” things, rather than simply made it easier for equipment to disappear. Nonetheless, he expressed confidence that his client wouldn’t be charged with procurement fraud despite the existence of manipulated vouchers. “It will be proven false if we have to prove it false,” he said. “And I don’t expect we’ll have to.” Why would someone caught falsifying government documents be so confident that he wouldn’t have to prove his innocence? Because these veiled threats worked. It was another warning shot at these “experienced” members of Congress not to break from the lockstep protection of the Awans. And the rhetoric worked because there was truth behind it.

  When it came to the cybersecurity anomalies, Gowen blamed members, pointing to Congress’ “inefficient and decentralized IT system,” or what Bacon called a “shocking lack of IT and hardware security on Capitol Hill.”2 Would intelligence committee member Joaquin Castro really be willing to take the stand in a courtroom and admit that he’d never bothered to run a background check on his IT staffer? Would Representative Wasserman Schultz say under oath that she imagined her c
omputers were being safely administered when Imran was in Pakistan for months on end? Would Representative Andre Carson dare testify about his response to the secret email account linked to his intelligence staffer? Did Representative Ted Deutch realize that a judge would not permit his “no comment” routine when asked if he had ever seen his purported IT aide who worked at McDonald’s?

  If this case didn’t have undertones of extortion before, it did now, as the Awans’ lawyers could call one in five House Democrats as witnesses and expose their negligence, if not their acting as co-conspirators in a theft scheme. It would be the trial of the century, and under no circumstances could it be allowed to take place.

  * * *

  After these warnings directed at Democrats, something changed. Imran, who had previously cried himself to sleep next to Sumaira, now seemed to have no fear at all. While the investigation, however ambivalent and slow-paced, obviously once had enough mandate behind it to trigger a dramatic airport arrest, in the weeks after, it suddenly reversed course, with the prosecutors seeming to become part of the same team as the defense.

  The DOJ seemed willing to do the Democrats’ bidding. Instead of seizing evidence through warrants and interviews with witnesses, prosecutors seemed to simply leave it to Gowen to provide much of the information and explanations they’d use to form their conclusion. “We are trying to be as helpful as possible to law enforcement to provide them any information or access they need,” Gowen told Fox News.

  The focus on Dropbox and, to some extent, even the House's network logs were somewhat of a red herring. Imran had direct physical access to these machines and could have copied their contents onto a USB or hard disk at any time without leaving any auditable trail—for nefarious purposes or even regularly as a rudimentary backup system. There was no way to rule out that Imran didn't have copies of everything, and the only way to attempt to prove it might involve searching every property he was associated with for every disk, USB, and hard drive, as well as every server he connected to from home. Of course, they did none of this. If prosecutors wanted to say they found nothing, such passive measures would be a good way to do it. They were dealing with someone who was actively hiding his actions and had enough IT skills to know how to thwart such a casual review. “He was always very discreet in these matters," Sumaira told me. "He said, 'I work very carefully on my laptop because they watch the IP,'” Sumaira said. “He never used his regular phone number to direct call, he always used WhatsApp because it’s untraceable.”