Obstruction of Justice Read online

  Sumaira tells me: “The funny thing is now I believe that even in America, law and order is also in politicians’ pocket. Now the notorious criminals are getting fame. This is how I figured out that the system here is not very much different than the Pakistani system.”

  And the worst part is, she is right.

  I’m just a regular guy. A thirtysomething investigative news reporter. With a baby daughter at home and another due any day, and my colleagues hitting the bars in Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown, never in my life would I have guessed that I’d spend America’s birthday seeing it through the eyes of this outsider who was positioned to see things that many of us haven’t. That I’d spend it with this woman who so truly believed in the American dream that she immigrated to this land of opportunity and rebuilt her life from nothing, going from riches to a homeless shelter to law school only to lose it all in a betrayal by the legal system to which she’d dedicated her career. America is everyone’s last hope, but for the first time, she felt hopeless. Everyone had failed her. All was in Allah’s hands now.

  She is hiding from people in the United States, though it is Pakistan where she dares not go. The people she fears were until recently some of the highest-paid and most privileged staffers in Congress—and may soon be again.

  One of them was her husband, Imran Awan, a computer systems administrator of unremarkable skill who wielded unexplained influence over a fifth of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He had an air of upper-crust respectability to preserve here, and that, more than whatever semblance of the rule of law is still intact, is what would keep her safe.

  But what he might do in Pakistan is a different story. For months at a time, Imran administered the United States Congress’ computer servers from Pakistan while he received unexplained protection from armed Pakistani government agents. A well-connected and morally depraved person, as she believes Imran to be, could have her or her family put down with a snap of his fingers.

  He told his wife all about how he used money he earned in Congress to pay police in Pakistan to torture his enemies—the same stories he bragged about to coworkers in a House cafeteria. “He actually gave money to a police officer and said, ‘Rape the guy. How many times you will rape him? I will pay you,’ ” Sumaira told me. He was paying a corrupt cousin on the Faisalabad police force, Azhar Awan, but “the cousin is a low-level cop, it’s higher up.”

  He was clever about it, sometimes making it seem to be an accident. She saw what happened after his stepmother called the police on him. “He would always say, ‘Oh the stepmother, you will see what I will do to her brother. I will get someone to hit him with a motorbike. I will pay people to start a fight and teach a lesson.’ ” Now this retaliation would be directed at her.

  Sumaira’s social worker had promised her that Imran would be in jail by now. After all, the social worker had seen in the news how shortly before the 2016 election, House investigators discovered that Imran was using his position to make “unauthorized access” to House data. It was only a few weeks after the election when she rode with Sumaira up the narrow escalator at the Fairfax County Courthouse to renew a restraining order against Imran, only to be greeted in the lobby by a short woman with curly hair who said she was from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This federal stakeout wasn’t unprecedented to the social worker, who advised Sumaira that she had rights and didn’t need to cooperate. The federal agent replied that this wasn’t about a run-of-the-mill crime, it was a matter of national security. Sumaira already knew that, and she also knew—at least at the time, she was sure—that she wasn’t the target. She wanted to talk.

  The agent showed Sumaira pictures of congressmen and, more often, congresswomen: Representatives Yvette Clarke and Gregory Meeks of New York; Representative Jackie Speier, a Californian on the Intelligence Committee; and Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who had resigned a few months earlier as head of the Democratic National Committee. Had she heard Imran communicate with these people? Yes, often. Imran could be heard at all hours picking up the phone and saying, “Hey, Jackie!” As for Representative Wasserman Schulz, he even traveled to Florida to meet with her and boarded a horse in Lorton, Virginia that Representative Wasserman Schultz’s daughter rode weekly. When it came to congressmen, she overheard one (as a non-native English speaker, she couldn’t remember all the names) tell Imran that his mistress had his House iPad and it could end badly. Only Imran could fix this situation for him.

  Fairfax County police reports show that Sumaira had called the cops on Imran three times since their 2015 marriage in Pakistan, but that only included instances when a report was filed; they had been to her apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, more often than that. The second time a report was filed, police found her bloodied after Imran tried to wrestle the phone from her. On another occasion, Imran told a police officer that he was a senior staffer for the United States Congress. Imran dialed a number and Sumaira heard a female voice on the other end. Imran told the cop a congresswoman was demanding to speak with him and handed him the phone. The local cop left without filing a report.

  The last time she called police, two years ago on July 18, 2016, the officer recorded that Sumaira said Imran “keep her there like a slave.” Sumaira wanted to get a restraining order, but rather than wait for that, she fled with her two children to her father’s house in Pakistan. Shortly after her arrival, two gunmen rode up on motorbikes and shot through the windows of the home. She told me what she told the FBI: to her, it was attempted murder to prevent her from bringing added law enforcement scrutiny to what was already a brewing investigation in the House of Representatives.

  As a former judge, she knew how these things worked, and she had evidence. A Pakistani police report filed by Sumaira’s father on August 3, 2016 stated that “around 2 a.m., between August 1 and August 2, unknown gunmen shot multiple fires at my house and fled.” According to an August 8 report in a local newspaper, a copy of which she also offered the FBI agent “a week after a Pakistani-American female lawyer’s home in Pakistan was attacked by unknown gunmen, the police have still not taken action.”1

  The curly-haired FBI agent said she didn’t want these documents, but she handed Sumaira a business card. When Sumaira got home, she hid the business card, but Imran found it and took it. “My life to him is an open store where everything is free,” she told me. Later, he seemed to know everything she had told the FBI, reciting her statements almost word for word. Even if she still had the card, that was enough to keep her from opening her mouth again.

  By the time the FBI approached Sumaira again two years later, Imran had had rigged her home with high-tech surveillance equipment and was blackmailing her with a hidden-camera sex tape; one he knew would cause her to be exiled from Pakistan’s rigid society if he posted it on Facebook, as he threatened to do. “He said, ‘If you ever try to leave me, the bullet will go into your ankle and then you will lose your leg and who else will accept you after that?’ I said, ‘You will ruin everyone attached to me?’ And he said, ‘If I have to.’ ”

  Imran told her something else: that he was a “mole” in Congress.

  Sumaira asked him what that meant and he clammed up. But later, he said he “knew too much” to have any chance of going to jail. “Sumaira, you think you can do anything to me? I fool the U.S. government. You’re just a judge. I am invincible.”

  She told this to the FBI, knowing it was relevant evidence. Imran’s job afforded him unrestricted access to all the emails and files of one in five House Democrats and their staffs; what House officials called the “keys to the kingdom.” Given that he had been caught violating nearly every congressional cybersecurity rule and funneling data off the House computer network, and that the affected lawmakers were not doing anything about it, the prospect that he was extorting or blackmailing members of Congress loomed large.

  Only yesterday, July 3, 2018, she had told FBI Special Agent Spencer Brooks that she wanted Imran charged for his thr
eats and blackmail against her. Special Agent Brooks, however, was not on her doorstep to hear her complaints.

  That same day, Imran pleaded guilty to one count of bank fraud in a plea bargain arrangement. He told the Washington Post that he was a victim of Islamophobia and President Donald J. Trump had taken his career and his family from him. The Post reported that Imran “questions whether the case would have been pursued if he did not have a Pakistani name.”

  That morning, Imran’s attorney, Chris Gowen, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, gave reporters an unusual letter from the Department of Justice which defended Imran against charges the department had never brought. The document stated that the “government has uncovered no evidence that your client violated federal law with respect to the House computer systems,” dismissing—without explaining the obvious discrepancies—hard evidence gathered by nonpartisan House investigators.

  There’s an old expression: if you’re going to shoot the king, you better not miss. Sumaira had enraged Imran by going to the FBI, but he would go unpunished, leaving her more in danger than ever. I had tried for months to protect Sumaira as best as I could after everyone else had ignored or abandoned her. I couldn’t help but feel that I’d failed. When Special Agent Brooks showed up at her door yesterday and told the polite, burka-clad woman, incredibly, that he was there to make sure she didn’t try to go to Imran’s court date—something she had no desire to do—it was me who she called for advice. After the initial interview with the FBI and everything that had happened since— or more to the point, failed to happen—Sumaira was convinced she must not understand what types of things were relevant to the FBI. The agents hadn’t cared when she offered a police report about a shooting that could have killed her children, so why would they care that Imran had surveilled, threatened, and blackmailed her, and described himself as a “mole” in Congress? What did I think, as an American? They will care, I advised her. Tell them everything.

  There is much to say now, but there isn’t much that can be done. Tonight, now that it’s all over, I suggest the only concrete step I can think of: put any documentation she has in a secure location, like a safe deposit box. If the last two years have taught me anything, it’s that in this case, evidence has a way of disappearing.

  She doesn’t seem to follow. “I have shown all those documents to FBI,” she responds.

  I explain my thinking about preserving evidence and try to keep her spirits up about what happened yesterday.

  “I think it was important that you told the FBI what you did, even though they didn’t help, because now the FBI can’t say they didn’t know certain things.” Now, this is about holding the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice to account for their demonstrably corrupt handling of a politically charged case.

  But the truth is, I’m the one who isn’t following. How would that help her any?

  “The FBI knows. I guess they are on Democratic payroll. No one cares. Only God can help me,” she says.

  She continues to say that even a Pakistani lawyer who had been working to secure a divorce from Imran was now afraid to help her. “People are frightened. . . You just don’t get it, in Pakistan you can just kill people like dogs. My whole family is back there. There is so much he can do. He knows how to cover his tracks.”

  If, after publication of this book, anything happens to Sumaira Siddique or her family members in Pakistan, you’ll probably know who ordered the hit.

  And so will the United States Department of Justice.

  * * *

  The crowds are out for the Fourth of July, teeming masses of humanity spread across the National Mall, but I can’t help but feel as lonely as Sumaira.

  The first time I spoke with her on the phone, I took the call from the lobby of my apartment building to avoid waking my baby. A pair of young Mormon missionaries dressed in neatly pressed white shirts were resting there beside their bicycles. I wondered what they must have thought as they overheard my end of the call: “So the congressmen are paying for this Hillary Clinton lawyer?. . . He said he was going to shoot your legs off?. . . What did he want you to do with the bars of gold?”

  The events surrounding the case of Imran Awan were so surreal and so inadequately covered by the press over two years that one could be forgiven for dismissing them as impossible, which is exactly the reaction sought by the dozens of Democratic congressmen and women, congressional staff, and others who know the evidence but have publicly dismissed it all anyway. It was a “gaslighting” campaign massive enough to make a person second-guess everything he’d ever thought he’d known to be true. One so concerted that only skilled political operatives could pull it off.

  The two-year odyssey, playing out against a backdrop of a media and political environment that claimed to care about cybersecurity in politics, pitted tribal loyalty against integrity and made for strange bedfellows. Democrats protected aides who had apparently victimized them; Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and Attorney General Jeff Sessions sided with Democrat Nancy Pelosi and against Republican President Trump; Bernie Sanders-supporting liberals joined forces with Freedom Caucus conservatives to demand justice; and the Capitol Police force appeared to go to lengths to guard the reputation of a member of Congress who publicly threatened their own chief.

  In the course of the unfolding scandal, congressional authorities documented a key piece of evidence going “missing;” congressional computers turned up in an elevator shaft and multiple Democratic staffers lost their jobs for whistleblowing on Imran.

  The FBI had followed a hacking suspect to the airport, found $12,000 in undeclared cash in the suspect’s suitcase, and filed papers saying it believed she was fleeing for good—but first it allowed her to board the flight to Pakistan. Prosecutors granted Imran a sweetheart plea bargain while he was soliciting others to buy bricks of gold and create straw companies. A white male lawyer mocked a burka-clad widow, while press releases implied that Sumaira and three other Muslim women who separately alleged that Imran was guilty of wiretapping, extortion, or death threats were Islamophobes. The press gladly ran with the storyline offered to them: this was all part of a diabolical plot by President Trump to get a Democratic family man.

  In this topsy-turvy world, a major cybersecurity breach in Congress was ignored lest it distract from the alleged Russian hacking of the computers at the Democratic National Committee, and the well-documented crimes of Imran Awan were dismissed as a “conspiracy theory.” One that would require believing that a vast array of people who didn’t even know each other and who had neither the power nor the motive worked together over two decades and across two continents to frame Imran—itself a fantastical claim.

  I’d met the forgotten men and women struggling to be heard—people like Sumaira and so many more like her, including rank-and-file Democratic staff in the House of Representatives who were ripped from their ordinary lives by extraordinary events of no choosing of their own. But mostly, I’d met powerful elites who would rather remain silent: Democrats and Republicans who knew what was going on but were too afraid to do anything about it, all of them hoping someone else would step up.

  This scandal began with one astonishingly manipulative, cutthroat, and depraved family. But I soon realized that the cover-up was much bigger. That I’d followed a trail that risked implicating both political parties and their enablers in the justice system and the media. I saw firsthand that what’s been called the “deep state” exists. It has one goal: to maintain the status quo that gives its members power and influence. Yes, this 242nd birthday party for the United States of America is well attended with an eclectic crowd. But as the fireworks sputter into a slow crackle, it is a lonely one indeed. And it is not only Sumaira’s faith in American justice that is being tested; it is my own.

  TWO

  FRAUD ON CAPITOL HILL

  (2014-2016)

  Since 2014, Eddie Flaherty, a Democratic staffer for the Committee on House Administration, had tried to blow the whis
tle on IT aide Abid Awan for stealing cell phones. Stout, jocular, and graying, Eddie took seriously the committee’s important if unglamorous work of “oversight of federal elections and the day-to-day operations of the House of Representatives.” His desk was wedged in the few feet behind the office door of Jamie Fleet, the lead Democratic committee staffer and his boss, and was bounded on a third side by a closet. His alcove was barely bigger than a phone booth; so small that every time the door opened, it almost slapped him. As the entryway proceeded past the alcove and closet, the room opened to Jamie’s plush, spacious office—the site of many high-powered meetings. The alcove was a degrading place for a middle-aged white-collar worker to do business, so comically cramped that only Eddie’s short physical stature seemed to make it possible. It conjured images of a Chihuahua sleeping at the foot of its owner’s king-sized bed. Eddie labored just as many hours as Jamie and was twenty years older, yet made less money. But Eddie was fiercely loyal to Jamie and never complained, except about one thing. He constantly harped on the issue of Abid Awan’s stolen cell phones even though no one seemed to care.

  There was a Verizon kiosk in the Longworth House Office Building, and, as at many Verizon stores, if you signed up for a new phone plan, you could get a new phone. But because of the way the House subsidized phone lines, this one worked a little differently. The plan could be cancelled soon after it was set up. Abid appeared to have figured out how to exploit the loophole to get dozens of new iPhones, which Eddie assumed he was reselling. But the clerk at the Verizon kiosk wouldn’t disclose statistics and claimed he couldn’t tell whether a phone tied to a given contract was actually activated and operating on that line. It was hard to get angry at the low-level Verizon worker because the truth is the safeguards set up by Eddie’s own committee were just as unhelpful. It turned out that the House Committee on Administration itself didn’t track cell phones by serial number. No matter how damning the circumstantial evidence, technically, "I couldn't prove it," Eddie told me.