Obstruction of Justice Read online

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  In late 2015, the outlines of a more substantial scheme emerged thanks to the efforts of one brave woman.

  Wendy Anderson is a forty-one-year-old African American with an easy ability to strike an outward balance that made some women on Capitol Hill envious. She wore understated but elegant jewelry tucked under power suits that seemed to leave no doubt that she was aware of the import of the position she had.

  She’d bounced around Florida and Brooklyn before landing her post as deputy chief of staff to Representative Yvette Clarke, a Brooklyn congresswoman, and, having run into some money problems that led to tax liens being placed against her in New York State in 2009 and 2010 as well as an eviction, understood the plight of the impoverished constituents in Clarke’s district. But she also understood that being in this high position, in the seat of power where laws were made, meant that laws must be followed. She agreed wholeheartedly with Representative Clarke—who got her start in politics by inheriting her mother’s seat on New York’s City Council—that the government needed to spend more on the social welfare of struggling people like those in Brooklyn. She knew that with that commitment to greater resources for the needy, those like her and other top managers in Clarke’s office—with their $160,000 salaries—had all the more duty to ensure that every penny of taxpayer money went as far as possible. Like in other congressional offices, an annual budget of $1.2 million had to make do for representing 600,000 citizens. Considering it had to fund D.C. and district offices, travel, expenses, and fifteen staffers to get the job done, that sum wasn’t as much as it sounds like. In fact, it wasn’t nearly enough. The best Wendy could do was pledge that Representative Clarke's little section of the House was a well-oiled machine. The people of Brooklyn needed it and deserved it.

  It was this kind of work ethic that had her in the office on a Saturday in the waning days of 2015 to put in hours without distraction. Representative Clarke was back in Brooklyn for the weekend as usual, but Wendy noticed the door to the congresswoman’s office was ajar. When she swung it open, her first thought was that it looked like Christmas. There was an incredible assortment of boxes of new merchandise strewn everywhere. Much of was the kind of thing you’d see at home, not the office: Apple TVs, iPod music players, and other consumer electronics. Alone by the congresswoman’s desk was Abid Awan.

  His presence in the inner sanctum was inappropriate to say the least. Abid handled routine IT matters like setting up a new staffer’s email account or resetting a password for a handful of congressional offices, each on a part-time basis. He was technically a direct employee of Representative Clarke’s staff, a W-2 employee in IRS parlance, but he wasn’t really part of the team. With just over a dozen staffers, all from policy backgrounds, there was little necessity for an IT guy to be embedded in the culture, nor too involved. Certainly, there didn’t seem to be any reason he should have keys to the office locks. And in an environment where you paid your dues and acknowledged your place in the pecking order, there was even less reason he should feel comfortable letting himself into the congresswoman’s office like he owned the place.

  That was to say nothing of the boxes, which were far more numerous than her office could ever need. The Capitol Hill work environment is pretty ascetic once you got past the high ceilings and ornate molding. There was no such thing as perks like these in any congressional office she’d seen, and she’d never heard of any office in the world that would need an iPod.

  She asked Abid what was going on.

  “These aren’t your items,” he said. “They belong to another office.”

  She had never had a good feeling about Abid. This equipment certainly smelled like stolen goods.

  “Whatever they are, get them out of here,” Wendy hissed.

  A few weeks later, Clarke’s chief of staff, Shelley Davis, quietly departed the office’s employ. Before he was hired by Clarke, Shelley, a skinny black man with a shaved head, had worked as the travelling assistant for the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr. (his replacement filed a lawsuit alleging that part of that job was discretely arranging the reverend’s rendezvous with mistresses1), and for Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who was known for such abusive tirades that half of her staff quit or was fired each year.2 Though he was paid well, he had money problems, and had once even been evicted from his residence in D.C. He was Congresswoman Clarke’s closest and most trusted confidant, and now he was leaving with no new employer listed on his LinkedIn page. When I called him and asked about the circumstances of his departure, he declined to answer and blocked my number.

  Wendy Anderson was promoted to chief of staff. One of her primary duties was managing the office’s money. She found that the office had long been paying for huge amounts of extraneous electronics, and when she looked around, she didn't see them. Yet, the payments had been authorized by Shelley.

  She knew from her chief of staff training that under House rules, members of Congress were personally financially liable when their offices went over budget or if money couldn’t be accounted for. She’d been working toward this job for years, and now it was her ass on the line—hers and Representative Clarke’s. To ensure her smooth transition to chief of staff, she had access to an archive of Shelley’s emails. She searched them for Abid’s name and what she found troubled her. Shelley and the part-time IT guy seemed far closer than there was any reason they should be. The emails seemed to show Abid ordering items for Shelley with no business reason. In February 2016, Wendy ordered an audit of the office’s equipment, matching it with the official inventory record. The audit found that $118,416 worth of equipment was missing. That was one-tenth of the office’s annual budget, or enough for two hundred iPads or 120 laptop computers—ten to twenty for each staffer.

  She took these findings to Representative Clarke. The congresswoman was oddly defensive, not only of Shelley, but also of Abid. She seemed to simply want the problem to go away.

  Wendy called the hotline of the chief administrative officer, who kept track of the House’s assets. When a small item went missing or a laptop was accidentally broken, they could be “written off” of the inventory, but a six-figure write-off was unheard of. Nevertheless, Wendy received permission to simply remove the massive trove of equipment from the House’s records as if it had never existed.

  Still, as Wendy pressed Representative Clarke about the importance of the issue, something about the congresswoman’s response didn’t feel right. Representative Clarke was a member of the House Committee on Ethics, the very body charged with levying sanctions against wrongdoers in the House. Didn’t she understand how this looked? The Shelley problem had been taken care of, even if there were no real consequences for him. But with Representative Clarke refusing to fire Abid despite one of the most dramatic and inexcusable events that could be associated with someone from whom the office asked so little, what’s to say something wouldn’t go wrong again? A chief of staff normally has wide latitude over hiring and firing. But Congresswoman Clarke refused to let Wendy fire Abid. So, she printed out the suspicious emails between Shelley and Abid and took them to the House’s Office of Inspector General, which polices waste, fraud, and abuse inside the chamber.

  Months passed and there was no mention in the media or the House Ethics Committee about major theft in the congresswoman’s office. Then Wendy got a call from Jamie Fleet, the top Democratic staffer who ran the Committee on House Administration, alerting her that officials would be reviewing financial activity connected to Abid Awan and other Awan family members in each of the congressional offices that employed them. Wendy thought Representative Clarke now had no choice but to fire Abid. It would look bad enough that she had waited so long. She was stunned, however, that Clarke remained adamant that she would not fire Abid, a part-time worker whose job could have been done by nearly anyone. In some offices, the IT duties are performed by a legislative assistant who sets aside a few hours a week.

  Clarke did begin cooperating with investigators.
She and Wendy began meeting with them to go over everything that had happened. The investigators would fill them in on the latest progress in the investigation. But Wendy soon came to believe that someone was “backdooring” this information to Abid. District Director Anita Taylor, the head of Clarke’s New York office, seemed to know everything the investigators had said. The information could only have come from Clarke. Wendy told investigators that Taylor seemed to be funneling it straight to Abid.

  Wendy confronted Abid and asked him to explain the $120,000 worth of missing inventory. First, Abid said the equipment was never received, which was a blatant lie because items were listed on the inventory only after they were received and a bar code was affixed to them.

  He conceded that items were received, but argued that they shouldn’t have been added to the inventory, which exempts items costing less than $500. This was a bizarre quibble. One that seemed to assume that Wendy would be okay with equipment going missing as long as she could fend off investigators by invoking a technicality. Its premise was also incorrect; the purchases at issue were large.

  Finally, he blamed Clarke’s staff, saying they had “lost” the equipment. A lawyer representing one of the Awans later singled out Shelley and said, “I think there was potentially some issues there.” Abid also said some equipment had been inexplicably discarded. A new 65-inch TV, he claimed by way of example, had been thrown away because there wasn’t enough space for it.

  Finally, Clarke relented and agreed to fire Abid.

  But a fear brewed in the office. In any small company, the hostile firing of the sole IT administrator leaves the company vulnerable. The IT worker may be the only person who knows the ins and outs of the office’s particular computer setup, giving him inordinate leverage. A vengeful IT aide could sabotage the system on his way out, or simply decline to facilitate a transition. Here, it was worse as it turned out that Abid had the passwords not only to Clarke’s House accounts, but to all of her personal logins for things like banking, credit cards, and personal email. Why, no one seemed to know. Was it because Clarke was so tech-illiterate that she had enlisted him as an unpaid personal assistant, helping her navigate the web for basic tasks? Or something even stranger?

  Wendy believed, and House officials concurred, that Abid might retaliate if he were fired, inflicting untold damage onto the congresswoman’s personal life or simply rendering all of the office’s computers inoperable. A careful operation was planned. Just before the firing was set, a House information security specialist sat down with Representative Clarke, reset all of her personal passwords, and locked Abid out of Representative Clarke’s House computers. Abid was fired on September 19, 2016, and Wendy was shaken by the ordeal. She returned to the office late that night to pick something up and the door to the congresswoman’s inner office was open a crack. She sensed that Abid might be behind it and ran out of the office, frightened. It was just a gut thing and there is no indication that he was, but Wendy was not feeling quite at home in Representative Clarke’s office anymore.

  That feeling was cemented later that week when Representative Clarke told Wendy she was having second thoughts and wanted to undo the firing.

  She never did it, but just a couple months after Abid was fired, Wendy’s brief ride at the helm of Clarke’s office was over too. She took a job as chief of staff to Val Demings, a newly-elected congresswoman from Florida, in many ways a step down because the freshman member lacked the seniority and committee assignments of Representative Clarke, who had been, ironically, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, Science, and Technology. When I ran this whole saga by Clarke's spokeswoman, she wouldn't tell me whether Wendy would have had the option of staying on. But she only denied one element: Anita Taylor's alleged involvement.

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  Remarkably enough, the impetus for Jamie Fleet’s call to the Democratic chiefs of staff didn’t seem to have anything to do with Representative Clarke’s office. Around the same time that Wendy became concerned about equipment that was on the inventory but missing, staffers for the chief administrative officer (CAO) had discovered a different fraud scheme designed to keep equipment from showing up on the inventory in the first place. They found that in some of these offices—all of which employed Abid or one of his relatives—everything seemed to cost exactly $499.99. Not coincidentally, any item that cost more than $500 was assigned a CAO bar code. Periodically, CAO employees inspected the offices, scanned the bar codes, and ensured everything was still there. A depreciation schedule was incorporated that allowed old electronic items to rotate off the list. Anything less than $500, on the other hand, was deemed not worth tracking and essentially treated as petty cash.

  The Awans had invented clever ways of making it appear that expensive items cost $499. For example, an iPad costs $799, and it is common to spring for an $88 Apple Care warranty. The Awans billed the iPad at $499 and then added $300 to the cost of the warranty. The vendor got his full price and the Awans did not have to add the items to the official inventory. Dozens of invoices using similar creative math, and totaling tens of thousands of dollars, had recently been submitted. In March 2016, the CAO brought this information to the Committee on House Administration, and in April, the committee referred the findings to the inspector general.

  One wrinkle in the scheme is that the Awans weren’t generating the invoices. The goods were purchased from two major companies, CDW-G and More Direct, which had to rig the numbers. Ted Rambo was the salesman listed on the CDW-G invoices. When Rambo was brought in for questioning, he was scared. He brought a CDW-G executive with him. Rambo said Imran Awan essentially told him if he wanted to continue doing business anywhere in the House—a massive account—he’d need to play ball. They were the customer, after all. One thing eventually caused investigators to inform CDW-G that it was not a target of the investigation, despite the troubling truth that the company had knowingly and systematically falsified government financial records. Rambo convinced them that he, too, was a victim of the Awans.

  While keeping prices under $500 kept items off the chief administrative officer’s House-wide inventory, it didn’t hide them from the congressman or his chief of staff who still had to pay the vendor. In some cases, as with Shelley, getting the chief of staff to sign off wasn’t a problem. But in other cases, the Awans relied on a third scheme. They charged hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment to congressional offices, sometimes delivered straight to their homes, but never took the invoices to chiefs of staff. They simply let congressmen accumulate debts that became delinquent. Five offices had unpaid invoices more than five hundred days old.

  Clearly, the purpose of these schemes seemed to be to facilitate the disappearance of equipment. Investigators made the rounds to the affected offices to look for the items, and sure enough, they could not be located. A December 6, 2016 memo by the Department of Justice said that “some of the equipment either disappeared or never made it to the member’s office for whom the equipment was purchased.”3 The Congress members couldn’t tell investigators where the equipment on the invoices was because they didn’t have it. The Awans claimed ignorance as well until after weeks of excuses, they finally led investigators to an abandoned elevator shaft in the basement of the Longworth House Office Building, now walled off and turned into a closet. Inside was a massive stockpile of equipment, vaguely matching what was missing.

  The investigators concluded that the Awans had retroactively purchased similar equipment and placed it there to throw off investigators after learning they were onto them. With House budgets as lean as they were and technology improving and becoming cheaper, there was simply no reason to purchase electronics in such large quantities and let them sit, especially in such an odd place. If it was there all along, why hadn’t they just said so?

  Democrats convinced investigators that unless they had exact serial numbers for all the missing equipment and were prepared to match it up with the elevator cache, t
hey couldn’t prove that this was evidence tampering. It was a catch-22; the paperwork fraud ensured that equipment never went through the process by which serial numbers were recorded, but the Republicans involved in oversight of the case threw up their hands, conceding that perhaps this evidence wouldn’t hold up against aggressive lawyers in a court of law.

  So that’s how, after tips from two Democratic aides, an investigation into procurement fraud and theft wound up in the hands of the Democrat-appointed inspector general, Theresa Grafenstine. It was clear that the Awans were versatile fraudsters and Theresa knew that people willing to break rules don’t typically confine their predatory behavior to one area. One major aspect of the Awans’ work had thus far not been examined at all: the Awan family had access to more congressional data than almost anyone on Capitol Hill. Once her investigators looked at the server logs documenting the Awans’ network activity, the theft scheme hardly seemed to matter.

  THREE

  THE ELECTION SEASON HACK YOU NEVER HEARD ABOUT

  (CAPITOL HILL, 2016)

  As I sit here speaking with Sumaira on this humid Fourth of July night, I can’t help but think about the disquieting cast of characters surrounding the case of House of Representatives systems administrator Imran Awan, and how it seems the only people in Washington who have balls anymore are women. Like Wendy Anderson, none of them craved the public eye. Yet, of these two male-dominated worlds that had somehow collided for me—the U.S. Congress and Pakistani-American culture—it seemed that only a handful of people were able to put their egos aside and do the right thing, even if it meant being in uncomfortable situations. And almost all of those were of the supposedly gentler sex.