Obstruction of Justice Page 18

  “What did you talk about with the FBI when they came to your house?”

  Hadeed tried again: “I’m just going to object based on relevance.”

  Gilani had figured out by this point that there was no stopping Bacon. “They wanted to know about the money, where did they send that. And I told them I don’t know about that.”

  I knew from my reporting that Hina had long been sending people money in suspicious ways. Bacon wanted to know if the FBI had discovered that. “Now, did they ask if Hina was sending any money or was it just Imran that they were asking about sending money?” This lawsuit involved only Abid and life insurance, and there wasn’t a legitimate reason as to why trying to find out whether the FBI had caught on to his sister-in-law’s money trail would relate. Like every other aspect of the Awan affair, this kind of shocking conduct could occur only because one side was so motivated to make what happened go away that they’d do anything, and the side that was supposed to keep them in check was weak and anemic.

  Hadeed interjected: “Listen. I have a right to say this because it makes the case simpler. . . . This case is based solely on the January 16 date of death and the January 17 attempt to change the beneficiary.”

  Bacon barked: “We’ll be here another couple of days. So what time do you have to leave tonight? I’m not leaving until I get everything I need out of you.”

  Hadeed said: “Well, just ask questions that relate to the case and maybe we can get on faster.”

  Bacon ordered Hadeed: “You’re testifying now. Don’t do it again.”

  Hadeed pleaded: “Don’t trick her.”

  Bacon repeated: “Don’t do it again. Don’t do that again.”

  Hadeed said: “I can object on attorney-client privilege.”

  Bacon ordered: “No, you can’t.”

  It only got more surreal from there, as Bacon pressed Gilani for more information about the investigators and other witnesses. “Did they explain to you what they were specifically investigating?” he asked.

  “Did they tell you anybody else they spoke with?”

  Again, a single-minded desire by the Awans’ lawyers to find out who witnesses were. I’d seen how that ends.

  “Were there any other questions that were asked about any other family members?”

  If Gilani’s answers were to be believed, the FBI investigator didn’t want to find out about the Awans at all. The Bureau was checking off a box. That was obvious enough from who it sent to speak with Gilani: Brandon Merriman, a first-year agent from a sleepy Virginia office. He wasn’t exactly the FBI’s varsity team.

  “Did they ask you to get them any information or find out anything for them?” Bacon asked.

  Bacon tried to convert Gilani into a mole who would leak sensitive information from the investigation to her victimizers. “If they want to speak to you again, will you ask them what’s going on with their investigation?”

  Bacon forced her to reveal her Social Security number and other sensitive details. When Bacon asked Gilani for the name and phone number of the people who were financially supporting her— which would give away where she was staying—she said, “I don’t want to give you a name.”

  “I’m sorry, but you have to,” Bacon replied.

  “No, I don’t want to tell you.”

  “Counsel?” Bacon asked. “She can’t refuse or I’m going to go to court and ask the judge to order a response. I hope you explained to her she has to answer the questions.”

  Hadeed said, “I’m going to object to the relevance of the question. It has nothing to do with the issues in the case, but . . . ”

  “You have to give me the name.”

  Bacon pressed for other information, important to the Awans, but irrelevant to this case. “Now, did you ever tell any police officers or government officials that the Awan brothers were paying the police officers? And that they had a cousin whose name was Police Officer Azhar Awan?”

  Finally, when Gilani couldn’t avoid answering questions she didn’t want to answer, she lied. She said that she had never spoken to me and that she didn’t even have an email address.

  It was a brilliant move on Bacon’s part. He had set up a situation where no matter what, the Awans won. If Gilani told the truth, they had info that would give them an upper hand in the criminal case. If she lied, they could use the dishonesty to cast doubt on any testimony she might give at an eventual felony trial.

  And if she played dumb, they could use her claims of knowing nothing to contradict more forthcoming testimony at a criminal trial. “Do you know anything about Imran’s financial affairs?” Bacon asked.

  “No, I don’t,” she replied.

  When Bacon gleaned that there was more congressional oversight into the case than he knew, he had a conniption. “I’ve asked you whether you had a conversation with anybody about the Awan brothers. And anybody means anybody at any time up to today. Who did you speak with yesterday, ma’am?”

  “The people from Capitol Hill.”

  By this time, Hadeed seemed to have abandoned his client. “Alright. I want the record to reflect that I am now learning about this myself for the first time, too. So, examine her. I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

  “I think this is important,” Bacon said.

  Gilani pleaded: “But I told you I didn’t tell anything about them.”

  Bacon wasn’t done interrogating her about the investigation in Congress, and why she agreed to cooperate. “Correct me if I’m wrong, they did not just show up out of the clear blue at two or three o’clock last week. They contacted you to set up a time and come see you, didn’t they?”

  “Yes. They told me they will come.”

  “Did they call your land line or your cell phone?”

  “Cell phone. On my cell phone.”

  Bacon tried to make her reveal the identity of the congressional investigators. “If you pull up your phone, will you be able to see the phone number that called you?”

  “No.”

  “What about the Awan brothers did they ask you?”

  Hadeed had completely thrown her under the bus. “Just tell them everything. Don’t worry. You have to. Just answer. It’s okay. Tell them whatever—whatever they ask. I mean, unless you’re under oath to tell a grand jury.”

  Bacon: “Did they give you any papers and ask you to go somewhere like a subpoena?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. When they asked you to tell them some things and they said they could help you, did they explain what kind of help they were willing to give you that they wanted to help you with?”

  “They didn’t say anything about help.”

  Bacon was getting at whether the government was willing to put Gilani in the witness protection program. Something that, based on what she’d told me, was entirely reasonable and probably necessary. “Did they ever indicate what the possibilities or the kind of help they could give you; whether they could take care of you, whether they can put you somewhere else, so you can get away from them or anything like that?”

  No, they’d never bothered.

  It was hours into the grueling session when Bacon made his big reveal: he knew the exact dates that Gilani had corresponded with the FBI over email, as if he could see her email account. Imran had warned her not to talk to the police, and Bacon wasn’t happy.

  “You’re a liar, aren’t you?” he lashed out. “[redacted] is your email address, isn’t it? And you send emails from that address including two emails to the FBI, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, a long time ago.”

  “Ma’am, you lied to me, didn’t you? You lied to me, didn’t you? You’re a liar, aren’t you?”

  “I forgot about that. It was not in my mind.”

  “Ah,” Bacon roared. “I think we need to take a break before I explode.”

  The deposition ended with an ominous warning. Bacon told the widow not to “dig a hole deeper and deeper to the point where you can’t get out.”

  * * *

 
Bacon would not tell me how he knew about Gilani’s email correspondence with the FBI. But given that she said Imran had stolen two laptops from her and placed devices behind her computer, one possibility was obvious. To test whether the Awans were hacking Gilani’s email while the criminal case was proceeding, I sent emails to her with a tracker—an embedded one-pixel white image that caused a server ping that reported back to me when, where, and on what type of device the email was opened. The emails were opened in London, Pakistan, and Texas. Gilani’s sister, who lives in Pakistan, said she helped manage Gilani’s email since Gilani does not speak English, but said there is no reason emails should have been opened in the other locations.

  I emailed Gilani to let her know her email account might be compromised, but it was likely deleted before it ever got to her. That email was opened in London and Kansas, but never in Virginia or Pakistan.

  The Awans weren’t done following through with the retaliation they had promised would come to Gilani for speaking to the police. Two weeks after the deposition, on October 19, 2017, a bank account Gilani controlled was drained of $5,952, its entire balance, through a transfer to Abid Awan. Bank of America later credited the amount back to the account as an unauthorized transfer. “He used the online method” to make the transfer, Gilani told me. “It is another fraud of Abid Awan.”

  But she was too afraid to press criminal charges. “Abid Awan is threatening me,” she explained in an email. “They can hurt my relatives in Pakistan.” A figure in a criminal congressional cybersecurity breach case had told me in writing she was being violently threatened to keep quiet, and the prosecutors handling the case were completely uninterested. It was obvious she knew more about money flowing from Capitol Hill to Pakistan than she was willing to say, and if her cousin Syed knew about iPhones and iPads going to Pakistani officials, she did too. But there was no offer of witness protection.

  The brothers, it seemed to me, were covering up a likely case of hacking and extortion on Capitol Hill with more hacking and extortion—and it was working. In fact, Gilani testified under oath in the deposition that the Awan brothers—who prosecutors knew were improperly funneling data off the House network—were inclined to use their high-tech skills to engage in hostile surveillance. “He has connected my phone, my house phone, with his own phone,” she testified. “Whenever I talked to someone in Pakistan, [Imran] told me later on that you told this, you said this.” This statement was being delivered to prosecutors on a silver platter in the form of a sworn legal document. But prosecutors didn’t want to know what she had to say. I know that because when I asked Hadeed for the transcript of the deposition, the court recorder had to type it up from her audio tape, since no one else ever ordered it.

  * * *

  A few months later on March 7, 2018, the parties were back in civil court for the judge’s decision on who would get the life insurance money. The shaved-headed Bacon was slamming the widow even before she arrived.

  Gilani was two minutes late. “Is your client lost? Does she own a watch?” he said. Sitting in the pew-like seats, which were otherwise empty except for Wajid and a TV reporter named Neil, I thought to myself: maybe your client is holding her in captivity again.

  Bacon couldn’t stand that reporters were there to witness the ugly scene. He threatened Hadeed for giving me a copy of the video that showed the Awan brothers preemptively building a body of evidence for the inevitable fraud allegations by having their father sign the insurance paperwork. “Are you going to share any more info with them? I hope not. I hope you learned that lesson,” he said, glaring at us.

  As Representative Wasserman Schultz publicly painted the Awans to the media as innocent victims of Islamophobia, Bacon mocked the elderly, burka-clad widow relentlessly: “She’s a wacko lunatic, what are you going to do?” he said. “Is it like talking to a wall?” he asked Hadeed. When Gilani arrived and the court-appointed translator began doing his job, Bacon tried to make him shut up. “I can’t hear myself think,” he said. The judge told him Gilani was entitled to know what was going on in her own court proceeding.

  The immediate facts of the life insurance couldn’t be more suspicious. Jamal had filed a death certificate to the government that falsely claimed his father was divorced, and Abid used that certificate to remove Gilani from the life insurance policy—after her husband’s death. When Hadeed tried to bring up the lie on the death certificate, Bacon acted like he was crazy. “Why is that even relevant?”

  Hadeed didn’t bother to explain, nor did he introduce any evidence to the judge about a pattern of fraud by Abid. For example, the witness who signed the life insurance paperwork was Abid’s wife Nataliia, from whom, he previously swore under oath in order to perpetrate obvious bankruptcy fraud, he was separated. Hadeed didn’t point out the timing of the move as it related to the federal criminal case—that Abid’s brother Imran committed bank fraud the very next day after the life insurance move, wired the money to Pakistan, and got arrested by the FBI—which would have established a motive for Abid. He didn’t question the mental capacity of the dying, heavily medicated man—who visitors to the hospital room told me was very out of it—to understand paperwork.

  In fact, Hadeed withdrew earlier allegations of fraud entirely and asked the judge to try the case based solely on interpretation of the contract language. “It’s simple,” he told me. “The other stuff wasn’t necessary.”

  Hadeed said three different signatures from Abid on financial documents did not match and put Abid on the witness stand. It would be the only time any of the six House hacking suspects ever faced questioning in court, where any lawyer worth his salt could confront them with their many lies. Though Hadeed only kept him up there for a few minutes, Abid was cocky and evasive. I was sure that if the Awans ever had to answer for their conduct in a real prosecution, it would be a spectacle indeed.

  “Why do your signatures look different?” Hadeed asked.

  “My signatures are not very consistent, I’m just a human being,” Abid said.

  “You were aware you were changing beneficiary from your father’s spouse to yourself?”

  “That was my father’s request,” Abid testified.

  “You’re not answering the question,” Hadeed said.

  After a couple rounds like that, the judge got fed up. “I don’t understand why the witness is having such trouble with the question. Your job is to answer the question.”

  “I’m not very smart, so it takes a while sometimes,” Abid said with a smirk.

  No one was surprised that based on Hadeed’s limited legal argument about the life insurance contract’s language, the judge ruled that “the son as the owner of the policy has the absolute right to change the beneficiary.” The court awarded Abid the $50,000 life insurance payout.

  “You should have taken the settlement. Now she’s not getting a penny,” Bacon taunted. “You’re not getting anything.”

  After the verdict, I huddled with the other two reporters in the room. Neil, the TV reporter, said of Bacon: “I knew he was taking advantage of this poor woman, but it was such a sight, you almost couldn’t help but root for him. He was like Mike Tyson just pulverizing them while they’re already down. He wouldn’t stop. A display of sheer power. And Michael Hadeed’s just there like bababababa,” he said, running his fingers over his lips.

  Wajid, the Pakistani news correspondent, had a theory: “It seemed like he threw the case.” Wajid said that was a common occurrence in Pakistan, and Gilani reached the same conclusion, wondering if the relatives who referred her to Hadeed had set her up. But Hadeed had a different explanation, one that seemed to illuminate Bacon’s threat about “learning a lesson.” When Neil asked Hadeed some questions outside of court, he seemed uneasy. He said Bacon threatened to sue him for defamation for conducting basic advocacy for his client. “I don’t want to subject myself to that. I don’t want to get myself in a lawsuit over this,” he said.

  NINETEEN

  HELL HATH NO FURY
LIKE A SHARIA WIFE SCORNED

  Chris Gowen, the Clinton aide-turned-defense attorney, couldn’t stop himself from uttering over-the-top falsehoods. Appearing on Sharyl Attkisson’s TV program, he said “There’s never been an accusation that he or anybody in his group did anything to . . . break a rule in Congress or anything like that.”1 It was absurd; the entire family had been banned from Congress for violating nearly every IT rule, and the violations were indisputably memorialized in server logs.

  Attkisson asked about the lawsuit filed in Pakistan by Imran’s own wife and fellow congressional aide, Hina, alleging that her husband threatened her with “dire consequences.”

  “Did he threaten his wife?” he asked.

  “No, absolutely not,” Gowen said. A response that could only amount to accusing Imran’s wife of being a liar.

  Then Attkisson asked about his other Sharia-law wife, Sumaira. “Was he married to two people?”

  “No,” Gowen replied.

  For Sumaira, this was the last straw. Gowen knew that Imran was married to a second woman under Pakistani law. In fact, he was furious with his client for his polygamy, which made it hard to paint him as an all-American family man. Gowen demanded that Imran tell him everything, and that he grant Sumaira the divorce she was begging for. Imran refused. Sumaira had gone so far as to show up at Gowen’s office and ask him to secure the divorce, which Gowen had said he would do.

  Imran had a different tactic. He caused the copy of the marriage certificate in the Pakistani courthouse to disappear. Sumaira found out because she used to work in the courthouse, and the clerk who agreed to do it was her neighbor’s brother. Still, both she and Imran had copies of their marriage license, and he adamantly insisted that she remain his wife, refusing to grant a divorce.

  One factor had allowed Democratic members of Congress to weather this whole scandal without turning on each other or the Awans: they hid in the anonymity of a crowd of forty-four and attempted to portray it as an institutional scandal; ideally one for which the Republicans whose job it was to police the House were responsible. Without a face, the whole thing becomes easier to deal with. And sometimes, dozens of faces are almost as good as none.