Obstruction of Justice Read online

  Defense lawyers, meanwhile, could turn to harassing truth-tellers.

  Hours after I published the story quoting former tenant Andre Taggart saying he’d turned damaged hard drives over to the FBI, Gowen’s law firm sent him a letter demanding $15,000 in damages related to the home, all of which Taggart said were made up.3 Typical of the list was supposedly killing a tree in the front yard by not watering it in the few months Taggart lived in the home. They even charged Taggart for buying his own washer and dryer and gifting them to the home, calling it debris that was left behind. He had moved out months ago and never heard anything from Imran or his lawyer in all that time. Taggart knew why they were crawling out of the woodwork now: retaliation.

  “It went back to the interview I’d conducted two days prior, which he’d undoubtedly seen, and I don’t know if it was an intimidation factor, but it had the complete opposite effect,” Taggart said in response. “Look, these people took advantage of us, and when I moved in I found government-issued equipment and I went through the proper channels and turned it in. I served in the marine corps for fourteen years, and if I downloaded files to an offsite server, I’m going to prison for a lot of years,” he said. “These guys are fucking crooks. They’d do anything for money. It’s ridiculous that he’s only being investigated for bank fraud. He’s a con artist. Let’s say he gets a slap on the wrist, he goes home happily ever after with the millions of dollars he’s siphoned from this country.”

  Gowen likely hated Taggart because he was a black marine whose Facebook page was full of anti-Republican screeds, which made him kryptonite to Gowen’s tribalism and identity politics ploy. “Andre Taggart is a criminal. He stole all of Imran’s stuff. There’s not one single agent in the FBI that will deny that. Marine. Taggart. Criminal. . . All of you think Donald Trump is a hero and the guy that’s going to get us out of this,” he ranted.

  “That whole story has gotten the FBI and U.S. attorneys FURIOUS at all of these little twerp reporters, that have been writing that, because what it was, was an old BMW radio that was in there that was damaged from a car accident. That was the only thing that was found.”4

  It was a stunning response. Taggart wasn’t an idiot; he knew the difference between a bunch of Blackberry phones and an old car radio. He knew what he handed over to the cops, and he did it with no knowledge of any congressional investigation. He only did it because Gowen’s law firm and Imran raised his suspicions by being so adamant about getting the items back. It took chutzpah—or more likely, a reliance on the fact that most listeners didn’t know these details—to even say such a nonsensical thing.

  Not only that, but what was Gowen doing hanging out with FBI agents and U.S. attorneys, talking shit about witnesses and the media together? What kind of conversations were going on that Gowen was so sure that FBI agents believed the witness was the real criminal? If what Gowen said had any basis in truth—if the FBI really did allow themselves to be sicced on a witness instead of the suspect, and if they would really claim that the cache of electronics Taggart turned over consisted of only one car radio implausibly smashed in a car accident—then I could reach only one conclusion: the police had lost, removed, or refused to record the rest of the items.

  I never thought I’d entertain such a notion in the United States of America, but if that’s all the police contend they found in Taggart’s house, I am certain of it. Taggart is one of the most level-headed, clean-cut people I’ve ever met, who rose from a rough neighborhood of Rochester, New York, and had rigor, discipline, and ethics instilled in him through the U.S. Marines. Now his love for country had him simultaneously protesting against the Trump administration and against what he saw as an obvious security threat. A slew of Blackberries, an industrial-sized box of printer toner, wireless routers, and smashed hard drives turning into a single car radio through alchemy? Give me a break. Taggart had no incentive to make any of this up. People in power had reason to make it go away.

  Then there were the legal threats Gowen directed at me, a lone reporter with limited resources who seemed to be able to find more information than prosecutors could—or wanted to. He constantly threatened to sue me. But when asked on what basis, his claims were laughably false. He implied that I Photoshopped the Fairfax County police reports documenting abuse of multiple women, which are easily verifiable public records. He claimed that I was paying witnesses to talk. He had one fixation above all else: finding out who my sources were. He tried to do a deal with me where I would turn over all my notes to him.

  But strangest of all was the evidence that the government was turning over to Imran.

  At Imran’s second court appearance in October 2017, prosecutor Marando said, “Earlier this week, there was the inadvertent disclosure of law enforcement materials to defense counsel. There may be a motion on that.” In other words, law enforcement had improperly given a trove of evidence to Gowen.

  Imran’s second wife Sumaira told me that when it happened, Imran came home joyous and gloating about it. As he recounted it to her, “The cop came to Chris Gowen’s office with a stack of papers. . . . Then he came back and said, ‘I thought you guys were the other party.’ He was very, very angry. But Gowen made copies.” In Sumaira’s mind, things were starting to add up. This could explain how Imran seemed to know exactly what she’d told the FBI, causing her to believe providing more evidence to the Bureau would only trigger more retaliation.

  I emailed Bill Miller, a former Washington Post reporter who is now the spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, and sent him a detailed outline of what I was writing: that the government had improperly handed over evidence to the defense. Instead of getting a response from Miller designed to ameliorate my concerns, three hours later, I got a response from Gowen. “I hear you are writing another article about me—I assume you don’t want to fact check it?” Gowen wrote. “From what I hear, you have it totally wrong as usual.” I had not told a soul but Miller about any upcoming story involving Gowen.

  I followed up with Miller to ask if prosecutors had provided information about my upcoming story to Gowen. “I’m not going to get into what we do internally,” Miller said. “I communicate with the prosecutors regularly when I get media inquiries.”

  I asked Gowen how he got the information. “I have been told by my source on the Hill,” he said. If true, this would imply that prosecutors were leaking to Democrats, who were providing information about an ongoing criminal case to the attorney of a hacking suspect.

  If this happened because Awan was working members to get him off the hook, it was a crime. Any former senior congressional staffer who “within one year after the termination of that employment,” communicates with his former office to seek “action by a member, officer, or employee” can be jailed for a year.

  Gowen claimed the evidence inadvertently disclosed was a copy of a laptop belonging to Imran’s former tenant, Laurel Everly, who voluntarily turned it in to the Capitol Police in hopes of seeing whether she’d been hacked. Everly had previously told me that she found Imran to be an “extortionist” and possibly an identity thief, and as she’d heard more about what happened on Capitol Hill, she believed Imran was a national security threat. She felt that on a case this important, investigators surely wanted every scrap of evidence they could gather, however small. But she also said she worried that Imran would somehow wind up with even more information about her; she knew he was the type of person to retaliate. In the end, she decided to trust prosecutors for the good of the country. I rolled my eyes when she turned it in because it was almost certainly peripheral to the investigation—Imran had little reason to be interested in the data of an ordinary person like her, and any years-old hacking was unlikely to be detectable anyway—but Everly knew little about computers and I didn’t blame her for being scared or for assuming prosecutors were collecting massive quantities of evidence.

  Gowen told me: “I was told there was nothing on it and was a giant waste of time, and the laptop was ret
urned.” He said the Capitol Police officer who agreed to take it from Everly was disciplined, “poor guy.”

  There seemed to be only two explanations for giving the laptop to Gowen: either the government was incredibly incompetent, or it wasn’t an accident at all. Unaffiliated lawyers I spoke with said the police should never deliver anything to the defense. As Chris Farrell of Judicial Watch said, it was the latest indication that the Capitol Police’s continued involvement in the case seemed to be for one purpose: “to bury, constrain and minimize the Awan case.” He said the disclosures, both from the police to the defense and from the prosecutors to the defense or House Democrats, were “disgraceful and amateurish.”

  “What were the consequences for this misconduct? Who was disciplined or fired?” he asked. What is needed, he said, is “a legitimate, full investigation by a competent law enforcement agency.”

  If Gowen was telling the truth that the “inadvertent disclosure” was Everly’s laptop, then prosecutors seemed to care little that they’d given all of an innocent person’s personal data straight to a person who’d been indicted after an investigation into behavior that could involve using people’s digital files against them. The government hadn’t told Everly about any mistake. Miller, the prosecutor’s spokesman, wouldn’t tell me whether government policy obligated it to inform people who were harmed by such accidental disclosures. He also wouldn’t say whether the disclosure was actually the tenant’s laptop, or something more.

  If it was her laptop, Everly didn’t realize how bad the disclosure was. When she called prosecutors to find out if what I’d reported was true, they simply ignored her, leaving no recourse but to call Gowen’s office. When she dialed the law firm’s number, a voice from her past came rushing back to her: Imran himself answered the office’s phone. Gowen, the former Hillary aide, had put the suspected House hacker on his law firm’s payroll while he awaited trial, meaning Imran would have direct access to all the evidence.

  A lawyer doesn’t pay a client, the client pays the lawyer. This only raised a question that had been obvious from the beginning: how did the notoriously cheap Imran wind up with a well-connected Clinton lawyer? As acquaintances watched the glacial pace at which the case against Imran was moving, they often asked me if I thought prosecutors were giving him harbor because he had agreed to implicate congressmen in a theft scheme or in other misconduct he’d discovered through their emails. I always knew this was unlikely. Imran had never met a business partner he wouldn’t double-cross, but Gowen’s connections to Wasserman Schultz, the Clintons, and the Democratic establishment were as deep as they come, and his presence aligned Imran’s interests with their own. Sumaira told me how Imran wound up being represented by Gowen. “He told me, ‘The people who are supporting me, they hired Gowen. I want to get my case done no matter what and the people who are supporting me hired him for me.’. . . What he told me is Gowen has very good connections on the inside, they’re having two-to three-hour meetings sorting it out.” Sumaira was aware of Imran paying Gowen only $20,000 out of his own pocket, and with Gowen placing him on his payroll, that money would be recouped. The payroll maneuver was also a way around the judge’s order that the $9,000 in cash confiscated from Imran at the airport could not be returned to him for personal use but could be used to pay his legal expenses.

  But Everly’s laptop was just the tip of a much more concerning iceberg. Prosecutors filed papers saying they’d turned over a copy of the laptop left in the phone booth to the defense; the one with the username RepDWS and which Representative Wasserman Schultz said was “a member’s.” So, Imran was banned from the House computer network because, as the House’s chief administrative officer wrote, he was an “ongoing and serious risk to the House of Representatives, possibly threatening the integrity of our information systems.” Then after that, he was in possession of a congresswoman’s computer and left it in the most suspicious possible circumstances. Representative Wasserman Schultz’s desperate measures made clear that whatever was on it, she did not want it being made public, including by suggesting it had privileged legislative information on it. Now prosecutors were delivering a copy of the laptop’s hard drive directly to him?

  It turned out that prosecutors were giving Gowen everything they had in the House investigation, even though Imran had only been charged with bank fraud. Under the legal process of discovery, defendants are entitled to evidence they need to defend themselves against specific crimes with which they’ve been charged. Former prosecutors I spoke with said this additional, voluntary disclosure was astonishing, outrageous, and unheard of. Kendra Arnold, a lawyer with the Foundation for Accountability & Civic Trust, had an observation: “If he was Joe Smith from Idaho, this is not how the prosecution would be proceeding.”

  What was occurring seemed obvious. The FBI and the DOJ were getting massive political pressure from Democrats not to bring the case to trial. On the other side, Republicans were exerting no pressure at all since most of them didn’t even know what had occurred. The DOJ didn’t necessarily want to drop the whole thing, but the only way to pursue the case without revealing the true facts in open court was to negotiate behind the scenes, turning over all the evidence outside of formal channels and figuring it would be enough to strong-arm the defense into a plea deal. The problem is that if Gowen sensed their desire to avoid public courtrooms, all the leverage was in his hands: he didn’t need to accept a thing.

  Prosecutors seemed to freeze in their tracks. They couldn’t make the case go away because server logs, invoices, and other documents left no doubt that crimes had occurred on and off Capitol Hill. But they also could not close the case because Democrats on Capitol Hill were using its “ongoing investigation” status to avoid talking about it. They postponed court dates eight times.

  EIGHTEEN

  INSURANCE

  The retaliation against would-be witnesses rained down hardest on the Awans’ stepmother, Samina Gilani.

  The deposition in the civil court case about possible life insurance fraud took place on October 4, 2017—two days before Imran and Hina were scheduled to appear in federal court. It was conducted in the office of Jim Bacon, the Awans’ money-laundering specialist lawyer, with the assistance of a translator. It turned out that the Awans’ plan was to use the lawsuit for the same purpose that I’d wanted to: to force “discovery” to learn more about the criminal case on Capitol Hill.

  Bacon did so in a more aggressive and overt manner than I ever imagined possible, openly attempting to force Gilani to reveal details of the probe on Capitol Hill and badgering her in ways that, to a non-lawyer like myself, seemed like witness intimidation and tampering with an ongoing investigation. There wasn’t the slightest bit of effort to mask what he was doing.

  And when it was Gilani’s turn, her attorney, the beta-male felon Michael Hadeed, didn’t ask Abid a single question.

  It was a stunning gauntlet. For hours, Bacon hammered Gilani about the congressional criminal investigation, again and again. “Come clean. That’s the best,” Bacon—whose very named seemed designed to offend the Halal-observant widow—advised her. “Have you ever told anybody that Mr. Imran Awan committed any crime? Have you ever told anybody that Hina Alvi committed any crime? You understand me, don’t you?”1

  It is a basic tenet of our criminal justice system that grand juries are shrouded in secrecy, but Bacon didn’t care. He obviously wanted to know whether a grand jury was mulling a new indictment that would go far beyond bank fraud. “Did you ever testify anywhere about any of the Awan brothers?” he demanded. “Did you ever file any. . . declarations, or solemn statements, or affidavits for the FBI or anybody?”

  “Did the FBI or any Capitol Police or any government official ever ask you to sign any papers?”

  “Do you know what a grand jury is?”

  “Did you ever testify in court about the Awan brothers anywhere?”

  If members of Congress claimed what happened was no big deal, they should have asked Baco
n, who was concerned the investigation might involve a nexus with terrorism. “Have you ever told the police, when you called the police about your husband, or the FBI, or the Capitol Police, or anybody that Mr. Awan was involved in any radical Islam or radical Islamic activities?” Bacon asked.

  “No, never,” Gilani responded, adding that they’d never asked.

  The typical antidote to abuse of the deposition process is simple: the opposing lawyer will object. Hadeed periodically tried, meekly. “I’m going to object on this irrelevant questioning,” he said.

  But Bacon ignored him. “It’s very relevant to her—”

  “The only relevance in this case —it’s just simple, man. It’s just interpretation of a contract,” Hadeed said. He entreated with one of the most fearsome legal arguments of our time, one passed down from ancient Greek tribunals to the English common law system upon which United States civil torts are based: “C’mon.” He gave up without even waiting for a response. “Anyway, go ahead.”