Obstruction of Justice Page 8

  Perpignan lived on the top two floors of the townhouse, while Rao Abbas, who Imran told her was his best friend, lived in the basement. Rao was on the payroll of the House of Representatives, ostensibly running IT for congressmen including Emmanuel Cleaver of Missouri and Ted Deutch of Florida. But Perpignan said Rao was “home most days.” She added, “At one time Imran told me and my partner that Rao worked at McDonald’s and had lost his job.” It was enough to blow your mind: members of Congress were paying a McDonald’s worker and giving him access to all their data, even though he wasn’t actually showing up.

  Imran was loyal to few. He “would periodically talk bad about his best friend in the basement or the previous renter, and I am sure he did the same about me,” she said. “Imran is very cunning and shady, and I noted this throughout the time I lived there. He is very persuasive and well-spoken. He gives you a sob story and you believe him.” She recalled him “lying about giving me authorization to paint a room in his home, lying about the condition of the home when I moved in and out.”

  “He put the lease in his wife’s name although I only interacted with him and seldom saw his wife. He also asked me to give my rental payments and write my checks out to Rao Abbas,” she told me. “He did take my security deposit without merit.” Imran was so unwilling to lose a single day of rent that he scheduled her move-in for the same day the previous tenants were scheduled to move out, leaving Perpignan’s movers waiting.

  There was not a single person I spoke with that didn’t have stories just like this. I’d never encountered someone whose behavior had so concerned everyone he interacted with in my life. But the take of numerous tenants was only one part of the picture available to any investigator who cared to look. Most of the Awan court cases were at the Fairfax County, Virginia courthouse. The files were so voluminous that I couldn’t copy them all. They hadn’t been viewed in years and had to be brought out of the archives. I raced against the 4:30 p.m. closing bell to try to take in as much as I could, jotting down notes in pencil. More frightening associations emerged.

  While the Awans worked for congressmen who sat on the Intelligence, Homeland Security, and Foreign Affairs committees, Abid Awan managed a car dealership that took money from an Iraqi government minister wanted by U.S. authorities. The purported car dealership was called “Cars International A,” but most of the time, they called it “CIA.” Few people seemed to actually buy cars from CIA, but those that did tended to be vulnerable. In 2010, a woman from the slums of Southeast D.C. sued Abid, writing that he sold her a car and the engine went out two months later. Abid reneged on a promise to fix it and was summoned to court, but he never showed up, and she never got her money. He told another woman she could return the defective car he sold her and get her money back. He took back the car but never refunded her money. The same story played out a handful of times. Court-ordered financial judgments simply went ignored.

  The contempt for the legal system when they were in its crosshairs was coupled with a strange but seemingly justified confidence that it could be deployed as a weapon at the Awans’ disposal. The unbridled predation made it hard to believe that congressional data could be safe in the Awans' hands.

  Brian Jenkins of Silver Spring, Maryland, said the dealership sold him a car that would not even start without jumping the battery. According to the court records, “rather than replacing the battery, Defendant merely informed Plaintiff that he should keep the vehicle running and not use the lights or radio.” Apparently rather than provide him with a forty dollar part, Abid expected Jenkins to leave it idling in his driveway each night. Abid had told him the car came with a warranty, so Jenkins brought the car back. Abid stalled him at the dealership, telling him he was working on his problem. After five hours, he suddenly told Jenkins he would not be receiving any assistance and should leave. When he went to the parking lot, he found that Abid had summoned police cars to block Jenkins’ car in, leaving him stranded far from home with neither a car nor his personal possessions that were trapped inside. Under these conditions, Jenkins was browbeaten into agreeing to pay Abid even more than he had previously agreed to for the broken car (and his possessions).

  But there was no reward for his concession. When Jenkins left, Abid called the police again and reported the car—which Jenkins had now paid for twice over—as stolen. “Defendant is aware of the falsity of this report to law enforcement,” Jenkins’ lawyer said in the court case.2

  * * *

  On paper, Abid and a man named Nasir Khattak each owned fifty percent of CIA. Khattak also owned a longstanding car dealership called “AAA Motors” directly across the street. This partnership, like so many Awan business dealings, quickly descended into accusations of fraud and double-crossing.

  CIA never seemed like an ordinary car dealership, with inventory, staff, and expenses. On its still-existent Facebook page, its “staff” were fake personalities such as “James Falls O’Brien,” whose photo was taken from a hairstyle model catalog, and “Jade Julia,” whose image came from a web page called “Beautiful Girls Wallpaper.” If a customer showed up looking to buy a car, Abid would simply go across the street to AAA Motors to get one. “If AAA borrows a car to Cars International and they have a customer, it was simply take the car across the street and sell it, and then later on give the profit back or not,” Khattak testified. “There was no documentation. . . . If you go and try to dissect, you will not be able to make any sense out of them because there were many, dozens and dozens, of cars transferred between the two dealerships and between other people.”

  Khattak did not explain why he would ruin his existing business to help the Awans. “All of those transactions was to support Cars International A from AAA Motors,” he testified. “That’s why I did not make any money from my dealership, because my resources were supporting Cars International A.”

  Khattak said in court documents that after the business racked up massive debts, Imran somehow convinced a variety of creditors to draw a distinction between the two partners, Khattak and the Awans, and to turn on Khattak, making him the fall man.

  Abid incorporated Cars International A in 2009 while he was working for Congress, even taking out loans from the Congressional credit union. His Ukranian wife, Nataliia Sova, was also involved. A few months before the dealership was incorporated, she created a different mysterious company, Alain LLC.

  It’s not clear where the dealership’s money was going—it was sued by at least five different people for not paying its rent, not paying wholesalers for its cars, and cheating its car buyers. The predation spared no one.

  But we do know the source of some of its investment capital. In 2010, the CIA dealership took a $100,000 loan from Ali Al-Attar, described in the lawsuit as a doctor who could not testify at trial because he was a government official in Iraq. When I searched his name online, I saw that he is currently a fugitive from the Department of Justice, and that an officer for the actual CIA had connected him to Hezbollah.

  In 2003, while living in wealthy McLean, Virginia and practicing medicine, the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi government asked Al-Attar to establish the Iraq Ministry of Health.3 It might be said that he helped create the opening. In the leadup to the U.S.-Iraq War, Al-Attar had been the head of a group of Iraqi expatriates on whom Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz relied for guidance, even though Al-Attar’s parents were Iranian.4

  Al-Attar eventually returned to the United States and ran a sprawling, and as it turned out, criminal, medical practice. In 2009, the FBI concluded that he and his partner bilked more than two million dollars out of insurance plans like Medicare, including by stealing the identities of diplomats. He would use stolen Social Security numbers to bill nonexistent surgeries against patients. They recorded one man as having four hundred surgeries. The insurance scam worked by splitting the bills among numerous purported medical offices in multiple states. He refused to cooperate with investigators and would not even tell them where his office buildings were. In 2012, he was ind
icted for tax fraud and he fled the country. With Al-Attar in Iraq, money was moved from him to the car dealership through accounts intended for high-end real estate in McLean. A former Central Intelligence Agency officer wrote contemporaneously that in 2012—shortly after the loan was made—Al-Attar “was observed in Beirut, Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official.” As I was digging through these court records, Politico reported a bombshell story that Hezbollah deployed used car dealerships in Northern Virginia to launder money, but that law enforcement was hamstrung from acting by political considerations involving President Obama’s pending nuclear deal with Iran.5

  I was starting to see the Department of Justice—which, like most people, I’d always assumed was on top of things, and worried when I thought I might be risking the slightest infraction—in a new light. How could a figure like Al-Attar continue moving money into the Washington suburbs without consequence? For that matter, how were the Awans still free months after the findings of “unauthorized access” to congressional servers? Could the car dealership be some sort of money-laundering entity connected to Hezbollah? Was it possible that the government would look the other way at potentially dangerous crimes for political expediency?

  Abid Awan’s car dealership continued to rack up massive debts. In 2010, Abid declared personal bankruptcy, discharging $1.1 million in obligations.

  Just as Imran seemed to use others as his cutouts when it came to owning homes and receiving paychecks from the House of Representatives, Khattek said, “It was Imran . . . who was running the [car] business in full control.” Only Imran, he said, knew where CIA’s money went. Even though Imran was actually in control of CIA, since it was listed in Abid’s name, Imran kept his abundant assets.

  IT aide Stephen Taylor told me, “I’ve known people who declared bankruptcy and they’re stressed out, but they [the Awans] were the same. It was BS to clear their assets. They didn’t care.”

  Even Abid kept ownership of both of his houses through the bankruptcy instead of having to sell the second one to pay his suffering creditors, because he swore “under penalty of perjury” that he was separated and living apart from his Ukranian-born wife, Nataliia Sova. But as soon as CIA folded, Nataliia created two more, apparently fake, car companies based out of the house where Abid lived. Years later, Abid and Nataliia were still living together.

  They knew how to rig the system.

  NINE

  PLAYING DUMB

  There was one more court record that caught my eye: an eviction notice dated October 2016 and filed against Imran for an apartment in the slums of Alexandria. It was odd that someone who owned multiple homes and made such a high salary would be renting an apartment. It turned out to be where he kept Sumaira, his second wife.1 After she called the cops on him for keeping her “like a slave”—which occurred just as House investigators were closing in on him for cybersecurity breaches—he stopped paying rent, leaving her to be evicted. The landlord said Imran had been quick to note that he worked at the House of Representatives and that his email address was “123@mail.house.gov.”

  I did a double take when I saw the email address. When tenant Laurel Everly told me Imran said he could be reached in Pakistan at that address, I figured it must be some kind of misunderstanding and that she was using it as shorthand for the convention that every House staffer uses: firstname.lastname@mail.house.gov. Now it was clear Imran actually used that bizarre address, which removed the accountability that comes from having one’s name attached to an email bearing the House domain name. Can you imagine the terror one could strike, particularly in someone unfamiliar with U.S. government such as an immigrant, by emailing from that address and purporting to be some all-powerful official?

  Emailing imran.awan@mail.house.gov had triggered a bounce back that said the account was shut down. Now I tried this address. The email didn’t bounce back. That meant the username was still active and providing a backdoor into the House system months after Imran had been banned. My email program told me the name attached to the address was “Nathan Bennett.”

  A big part of Imran’s job was setting up email accounts for others, so creating extra accounts would be easy for him. Yet, even when it came to the one action authorities had actually taken— blocking his account to prevent further access to House data—they hadn’t done basic due diligence. There was still a gaping hole in the House’s cybersecurity, which was even more frightening considering Imran now had his back up against the wall.

  Worse, “Nathan Bennett” is not just any name. Of the ten thousand staffers on Capitol Hill, very few have anything to do with national security information, but Bennett is one of those few. Bennett, who studied military strategy at the United States Army War College, works for Representative Andre Carson of Indiana, one of two Muslim members of Congress. “My individual legislative portfolio covers national security and foreign affairs, including the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,” Bennett says on LinkedIn. “As [Carson’s] national security staffer, I developed and executed a plan to successfully secure the congressman’s appointment as a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (ranking member of the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats) and the House Armed Services” Committee. Imran worked as Representative Carson’s email administrator, giving him the perfect opportunity to steal his identity.

  I was sure Representative Carson would be apoplectic to learn what had occurred: the suspect in an ongoing criminal investigation had assumed the identity of a key intelligence staffer. I printed out the eviction paperwork proving Imran used the 123 account and took a screenshot of Bennett’s name attached to the account. Before I reported this story, I wanted to alert Representative Carson so he could close the account and prevent further harm.

  But when I took the printouts to Carson’s office, his spokeswoman wouldn’t let me see Bennett. She didn’t seem interested in taking the papers or hearing what I had to say. She simply said it wasn’t Imran’s address and that the chief administrative officer, Phil Kiko, would give me a statement waving me off the story. I told her that Kiko’s office had always told me policy forbade it from providing information about any aspect of this investigation, but she said, “Don’t worry, they’ll do it for us.” The statement never came.

  On the way out of the office, I got lost in the Pentagon-esque halls of the Rayburn House Office Building. I was lost in my thoughts about something the early tipster, Stephen Taylor, told me: Imran was so close to Representative Carson that he played video games with him in his office, and Carson’s chief of staff, Kim Rudolph, knew Imran was up to no good but couldn’t break Imran’s hold over the congressman.

  Kim Rudolph, he told me, is “very to the letter; kind of uptight, but every penny was accounted for.” When she was chief of staff for Representative Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, they “had an old printer go missing and Kim Rudolph called the Capitol Police and did a sting operation. It turned out it was a House employee that was taking things slowly.”

  The office’s muted reaction to something far more serious told you everything you needed to know. “Kim Rudolph would tell me Imran would go in his office, wouldn’t even talk to the receptionist, and hang out with him for a half hour. The congressman would then tell Kim, ‘You need to do this, this, and that for Imran.’ ” It was highly unusual for a congressman to be so concerned with routine computer administration of his office rather than delegating that to the chief of staff.

  I found myself in front of Representative Carson’s office again and decided to press his spokeswoman a second time. I finally convinced her to let me talk with Bennett through email.

  Bennett seemed more interested in separating himself from the story than in getting to the bottom of what had happened. He said the records must be a “fabrication,” and he meant by me, without even once expressing concern that this could stem from nefarious conduct by a systems administrator. “I do not, nor have I ever, had control of the 123@mail.house.gov email account or any oth
er account connected with Imran Awan or his family,” he said. “Regarding your screenshot, this is the first time that I have seen this. I’m not sure how or why my name is listed, but I can assure you that what you see is either an error or fabrication.”

  Didn’t he see that the entire problem was that he didn’t have control of an account in his name? Why was he so sure it was an “error” rather than a deliberate act by the person who had been banned from Congress by the police because server logs proved that he was making unauthorized access to Democrats’ servers? My God, I thought. Is this what the state of U.S. politics has come to, that a Democrat would rather take the word of a criminal suspect who'd been banned from Congress for egregious cybersecurity violations, if he was associated with their party, than look at crucial, independently-verifiable evidence if it was in the hands of a reporter from a conservative-leaning news organization? Or was the office taking this hostile posture because they knew exactly how bad the truth was? I had approached the congressman not for comment, but as an American doing my duty. It seemed the intelligence committee member had other allegiances.

  When I emailed the 123 address again a few days later, it still didn’t bounce back, and I published the story. Representative Carson never talked to me, but he did give interviews to local media in which he stood up for Imran and attacked me. “The Daily Caller is not a reputable entity,” Carson said. “I think that they’ve proven themselves to be very bigoted, Islamophobic, and anti-black. I think it goes along with their narrative of anybody who is foreign, who happens to be a Muslim, who happens to be black, happens to be Latino, who conducts unethical acts, they want to condemn the entire Congress.”2