Obstruction of Justice Read online

  Among them was Theresa Grafenstine, a spunky woman with kind eyes and the impossible job of policing corruption in Congress as the House’s inspector general, a position that made her one of only eight official “officers of the House.” Most people, even House staffers and reporters, had no idea the House Office of Inspector General even existed. That was by design. Unlike inspector generals at federal agencies, her bosses in Congressional leadership mandated that every one of her reports be secret, keeping any wrongdoing she discovered from the public and even from those in Congress. Since 2010, when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed her, Theresa had led a team that toiled in near obscurity.1

  By training, Theresa was an auditor, studying financial irregularities and following millions of dollars. She rapidly rose to the top of her profession by having a talent few number geeks seemed to have: people skills. She was the rare extrovert in a male-dominated field of auditors who, even if they had the mathematical prowess of Albert Einstein, tended to be bookish and a little socially awkward. Given that they were making determinations that could amount to accusing high-profile Republicans of waste, or do-gooder Democrats of fraud, it was these men who hit a glass ceiling. They couldn’t survive a day at the higher levels of management, which required navigating an environment as daunting as the House of Representatives, with its backstabbing and competing factions.

  Theresa's people skills came in handy, or perhaps were developed through her other capability. She was also a hard-nosed investigator who could read a suspect’s face and determine if he was lying, and could set traps with lines of questioning but also knew it was sometimes better to sit in an interview room in silence, letting the awkwardness build until the suspect started spewing forth in a nervous free association.

  She made this rare combination a trifecta with expertise in a subspecialty of the investigative field: computer skills. These days, a crime, deception, or theft was as likely to involve an IP address as a fingerprint. If the Watergate break-in were to occur in the modern era, the investigator who caught it would be one who could recognize an SSH key that was out of place, not a flashlight. The problem was that, at least in the government, most gumshoes came from cop-like backgrounds, many of whom had spent decades knocking on doors and ruffling through papers. They lacked digital literacy.

  Theresa was an essential weapon for an institution under such constant cyberattack as the House of Representatives. In Washington, everybody is somebody, and Theresa's qualifications as an undisputed queen in the field of cyber sleuthing were almost comically sterling. On the side, she led the worldwide council of cybersecurity professionals.2

  That made it all the more alarming when, in summer 2016, Theresa and her team of investigators realized that something was seriously amiss on the House computer network.

  * * *

  Somehow, a man named Imran Awan, his younger brothers Abid and Jamal, his friend Rao Abbas, and his wife Hina Alvi (Imran was a polygamist married to both Hina and Sumaira) were all on the congressional payroll as computer systems administrators. Each worked part-time for around eight members of Congress, forty-four in total. Their job was to configure servers, set up email accounts, and purchase phones and desktops for the offices.

  The problem is they were also logging onto the servers of other members of Congress who they didn’t work for. They were logging in using members of Congress’ personal usernames. They were funneling massive amounts of data off the network. They were accessing the House Democratic Caucus server with a bizarre frequency—five thousand times within a few months. And they used elaborate digital techniques to conceal what they were doing.

  Representative Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico had terminated Abid in 2015, before these other problems became known, but he kept logging into her servers after he was fired. In early 2015, Representative Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona had fired the youngest of the three Awan brothers, Jamal, for “incompetence.” He was a well-paid incompetent, joining the congressional payroll at $165,000 when he was only twenty years old and still employed by many of her colleagues. And why had the Awans’ elderly father Muhammad, a religious cleric who spent much of his time in Pakistan and had not a lick of IT skills, been briefly on the congressional payroll as the systems administrator for then-Congressman, now-Senator, Joe Donnelly of Indiana?

  It was July 25, 2016, three days after WikiLeaks threw a bomb into the presidential race and permanently brought politics’ dirty tricks into the modern age by publishing the first of the DNC’s emails, when Theresa brought the first results of her months-long cybersecurity probe to the body that oversaw her work, the Committee on House Administration. The timing of the discovery of the server logs documenting their behavior made the seriousness of it all impossible to miss. WikiLeaks was publishing the DNC’s emails on a weekly schedule, reminding politicians that cybersecurity breaches were a real and omnipresent threat. The threat of malicious actors inside the highest levels of the government itself should have made the infiltration of the DNC, a private fundraising group, pale in comparison assuming Democrats valued data from their country’s government above that of their party.

  Republican Congresswoman Candice Miller of Michigan chaired the committee, but in practice, congressional staff runs much of Congress, especially sleepy minor committees like this one. Theresa reported her findings to the committee’s Republican staff director, Sean Moran.

  Sean is a mild-mannered veteran congressional staffer with a short, slight frame and one of the rare gray-haired heads in a complex dominated by youngsters. He found the specifics hard to follow. After all, he only had two apps on his iPhone and it took his wife to install them. When he echoed his understanding of the findings to people later, it showed, saying “terabits” where he meant “terabytes,” and saying the Awans used “codes” rather than “scripts.” But the significance wasn’t lost on him. It was obvious that the committee needed to bring this to the top—Speaker Paul Ryan and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—and fast.

  Speaker Ryan’s office told Theresa to continue her investigation, but there was a complication. While many IT aides worked for members of both parties, the Awans worked exclusively for Democrats, so the investigation had to be done in a way acceptable to Democrats. A meeting was set up in the office of Kelly Craven, Ryan’s chief for internal affairs, about how to get to the bottom of it. The answer was very slowly or not at all. Craven heard viewpoints offered on one side by Nancy Pelosi’s counsel, Bernie Raimo, and on the other, Mark Epley.

  Raimo said, “These are our employees. You can’t look at any files or interview them without getting permission from their bosses first.”

  Theresa protested, “That’s forty-four members!”

  “Oh, and you can’t ask any members because that will disclose the case,” Raimo added.

  When Theresa complained that it was impossible to conduct an investigation under those restrictions, Raimo yelled, “You’re not the policeman of the world!”

  That meant Theresa was tasked with doing a cybersecurity investigation in which she was banned from talking to the suspects or their employers and had to watch data fly off the network without knowing what it was. Theresa considered where that left her. The Awans’ fraudulent billing of congressional offices for computers and other equipment wasn’t as critical as the cybersecurity breaches, but the falsified receipts contained easily provable lies. Those lies might enable police to put the Awans behind bars before they dismantled more evidence and did more harm. She just needed to learn how the falsified receipts were generated. She could at least search the Awans’ government email accounts, right?

  Raimo said no. The initial complaints named only Abid, so including the other family members would amount to a “fishing expedition.” On top of that, Raimo cited the “speech and debate clause” of the Constitution. That clause states that members of Congress “shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their attendance at the Session of t
heir Respective Houses, and in going to and from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.” The clause is part of the Constitution’s separation of powers and is intended to protect members of Congress from the executive branch. Raimo argued that it extended to IT support staff like the Awans, and implied that it protected them from Theresa’s investigation even though she was part of the legislative branch.

  Theresa offered a concession: have a third party use a computer command to pull only those emails sent to or about the federal contractor CDW-G. Authorities could then learn whether the Awans were running a fraud scheme, CDW-G was responsible, or the Awans had a man inside CDW-G. Whatever they found would be significant because CDW-G was a multi-billion dollar company that did business throughout the federal government. This was classic government accountability work.

  Even that was too much for Pelosi’s man. Craven looked at Ryan’s general counsel, Mark Epley, a former aide to the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice, to settle the dispute. He wasn’t making much of an effort to push back. Internal matters were different than the hard-fought legislative battles that played out along party lines each day on the campus. Such issues inside the House were more personal and routinely defined by bipartisan agreement, with a lack of consensus defaulting to inaction. Epley offered a meager, but classically bureaucratic, compromise: the House would preserve the Awans’ emails, but for now, no one would look at them. When the meeting adjourned, no such bargain was reached for accessing data that held the key to what by all appearances were major cybersecurity violations.

  Paul Ryan wasn’t just the head of House Republicans, he was the leader of an institution with hundreds of years of precedent and a reputation to preserve. The Democrats were in the minority, but they were far more invested in shaping this case than the Republicans, who didn’t seem to know much about it.

  For all Craven, Epley, and Raimo knew, the Awans might have been working for a foreign intelligence service, selling sensitive information to the highest bidder, or dealing in extortion or blackmail. Neither party in Congress seemed interested in finding out, at least not before the 2016 elections. Politics took precedence.

  FOUR

  THE PUPPETEER

  (CAPITOL HILL, 2016)

  The staff director of the Committee on House Administration’s job involves coordinating and brokering between various congressional offices, but it takes Sean Moran ten times longer to walk down the lengthy Capitol corridors than anyone else. It’s not because of his seasoned nature, having worked in Congress for as long as a large fraction of staffers have been alive; physically and mentally, he is spry. Rather, it’s because he knows and loves everyone. He can’t get from point A to point B without hugging every janitor, lunch lady, and Democratic and Republican assistant approaching from the opposite direction. Sean is a reliable and knowledgeable congressional aide, and this easygoing nature has helped him do his job. But if he has one downfall, it may be his trusting kindness.

  You don't last as long as he has on Capitol Hill without the constant friction of opposing parties doing one of two things: leaving you jagged and broken or sanding off all your edges. By now, Sean was smooth as silk. But you also didn't survive so many battles in the trenches without contracting a characteristic world-weariness. For that matter, you didn't make it to his age, making peace with a divorce and life's other various curveballs and inadequacies, without a certain amount of resignation.

  In a job like this, you had to go along to get along. If he was the kind of guy who drew a red line on every issue and refused to budge, he'd probably still be stuck somewhere in the 1990s. Hell, by his age, it seemed like a detached compromising was the only way to keep moving forward. Maybe that's what maturity is.

  All of this left Sean’s sprite frame saddled with layers: a spark in his eye behind spectacles. The clean-cut, rule-following look of a military man, where somewhere along the line his buzz cut had begun giving way to baldness. Alert posture, propping up the rumpled dress of a bean-counting bureaucrat counting down his days to retirement.

  The top guns at the inner-circle meeting remanded the issue to Sean Moran and Jamie Fleet, his Democratic counterpart on the Administration Committee, for executing their orders. But Sean was so troubled by the scandal that the sparkle in his eye had him considering doing something he’d never done before: going public. “I’m really afraid that they might be Pakistani ISI,” he said. “No investigation has been done to show that they aren’t. . .We need to shout this from the rooftops.”

  The problem was, while the notion that Congress gets nothing done is a cliché, at no time is that more true than in August. The House’s month-long summer recess is a humid, languid time, when the bigwigs are home glad-handing in their district, staffers trade suits for more casual attire, and all of Capitol Hill transforms into one big national park where tourists gawk and staffers bring their dogs to work. Sean would do nothing without the approval of his boss, Representative Miller, and she was checked out more than most. She was retiring from Congress and already had her sights set on her next gig, one that spoke volumes about what she thought of Congress: she was leaving to oversee the drains in Macomb, Michigan, as county water commissioner.

  In the end, neither party’s leadership would dare publicly take the position they were taking behind closed doors: that the existence of unknown data improperly flying off the House network wasn’t worth looking at. But before Sean could ask Representative Miller for permission to bring the facts to the public eye—triggering attention that he knew would force the House to examine what had happened with more urgency and intensity—he took a long trip to Latin America, where his wife lives. When he got back, he caught up with Jamie and felt him out on the idea.

  Jamie, like many Democrats, understood the way the media works far better than Republicans, so feeling this out would be informative. He might even agree with Sean. After all, Jamie had volunteered repeatedly that the cybersecurity findings kept him up at night.

  Sure enough, Jamie responded that the idea had already occurred to him. He found it so necessary that he’d even met with Theresa about it while Sean was gone. The problem, he said, was that Theresa had been stern that it simply must not be done. There were highly sensitive, intensive operations taking place and unless the pair wanted to be responsible for ruining the whole case, they needed to stay quiet, as difficult as that would be. This absolved him of an anxiety-ridden decision. But more importantly, the good news was that this meant somewhere, someone was treating the whole mess as the matter of national security it clearly was. Sean was a loyal soldier and he had faith in the nation’s institutions.

  But while Sean was jetting overseas and biding his time until retirement, Jamie was busily shaping the case behind the scenes. The moves had already been under way for some time, and now, one of the most critical pieces had been secured. There was no ban from Theresa on talking about the case nor any conversation about high-level, thorough investigations too top secret to reveal. Jamie had made it up out of whole cloth.

  * * *

  The tall, blond Jamie Fleet is nearly two decades younger than Sean, but was arguably more accomplished on Capitol Hill.

  He was a political prodigy who landed a spot on the Gettysburg Borough Council at the age of eighteen. He wasn’t even on the ballot; he won on a write-in campaign as a Gettysburg College freshman after convincing his fellow students that they deserved representation on the town council.1

  The teenage councilman soon started his own political consultancy group and made inroads into Philadelphia politics. He hitched his wagon to Representative Bob Brady. When Brady, an Italian-American machine politics operator who has clung to the chairmanship of the Philadelphia Democratic Party since 1986, wanted to move from Congress to the Philadelphia mayor’s office, he enlisted Jamie to work his magic. That mayoral bid was unsuccessful, but in 2007, just five years out of college, Jamie was at Brady’s side in
Congress, and Brady as then-chairman of the Committee on House Administration, chose Jamie to run it. That position put Jamie on the platform with Barack Obama at the forty-fourth president’s inauguration, it had him tossing a football with Obama in the Rose Garden, and it placed him on the House floor for the passage of Obamacare.

  If Sean was well-known and well-liked throughout the Capitol corridors, Jamie’s light shined brighter, even though he was now in the minority party. “He’s probably the most recognized person here, and that includes the Speaker of the House,” Representative Brady said. Jamie worked so hard that, for years, he often slept in his office—something not uncommon among congressmen, but virtually unheard of for a committee staffer.2 There was a reason Jamie was as recognizable to insiders as then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself: he’d become a top operator for her. Talking to him was a stand-in for speaking with Pelosi. Jamie spent so much time in the foyers of the House Democratic leadership that he wound up marrying an aide to House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer.3 Jamie excelled in exerting pressure in ways that accomplished the Democratic leadership’s goals without leaving their fingerprints.

  This required a rare personality. Good-looking, Jamie came across as gregarious, light-hearted, and an honest broker, while in fact he was restrained, calculated, and rarely gave a political inch. He’d let on that he harbored ambitions to run for Congress himself and was confident he could win, even in Representative Brady’s overwhelmingly black district.

  When I first came across Jamie, someone called him “the biggest puppet master who ever walked the Earth,” pulling on invisible strings and manipulating people and events.

  Chief Information Security Officer John Ramsey was summoned to the offices of the Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch, where the counsels for Speaker Ryan and Minority Leader Pelosi, a Capitol Police lawyer, and others, were waiting. It was the kind of high-level meeting at which busy people want concise summaries, and Ramsey was asked a simple but carefully crafted question about the Awan scandal: “Were we hacked?”