Obstruction of Justice Read online

  Taylor was angered by the brazenness of the response when I filled him in. “That really pisses me off,” he said. Representative Carson “was friends with Imran. They were really freaking close,” Taylor said. He had worried that his fellow Democrats might try to hide behind identity politics to make the whole thing go away, but it seemed so unbelievably cynical. Now, everyone was playing dumb. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters that she hadn’t followed the House cyber breach “very closely."

  "I’m not sufficiently understanding the situation to make any concern about it, but there are plenty of people who are under an investigation who still have their jobs,” she said, naming Attorney General Jeff Sessions as an example. She didn’t mention that her own top staff had tried to block a hacking probe into the Awans. One day, outside the Capitol after votes, Joaquin Castro of Texas, a member of the intelligence committee who employed Abid Awan, said there never was any cybersecurity investigation, swearing he was only told it was about money. “Do you have evidence that there’s anything more?” he asked. “If someone’s given you a document to that effect, please give it to me.” When I did exactly that and provided his office with detailed information, they refused to accept the documents or respond.

  The truth is that Democrats knew about the cybersecurity incident and were so worried about what it might find that they tried to make a law that could keep the FBI from investigating it. In May 2016, a few weeks after the Awan investigation had been referred to the inspector general, a cryptic paragraph titled “Cybersecurity Assistance” turned up in an unrelated bill thousands of pages long. “Cybersecurity is quickly emerging as one of the most important aspects of the House of Representatives’ security platform,” it read, but “constraints” on the executive branch’s ability to investigate are necessary. “It is intended that the Speaker, in consultation with the Minority Leader, outline the type of infrequent executive branch assistance that may be required, including. . . resources provided by the executive branch, actions and constraints on those resources necessary to protect the Separation of Powers, privileges under the Speech or Debate Clause, and other constitutionally-derived powers and rules.”3

  The goal of that paragraph was to make it illegal for the FBI to investigate the hack on their network without Democrats’ acquiescence. The bill into which the provision was slipped dealt with topics that typically fall under the domain of the Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch, a panel on which Representative Wasserman Schultz is a senior member. The language was stripped out before it became law. But a year later, days after Imran Awan left Wasserman Schultz’s laptop in a phone booth triggering a furious Democratic effort to block prosecutors from looking at it, similar language was inserted in a different bill.4 In fact, the language in the bill that became law is stronger, requiring “the concurrence of the Minority Leader.”5 Nothing would happen without the Democrats’ consent.

  TEN

  POWER OF ATTORNEY

  The strangest email I’ve ever received came not long after I published the first stories about what had occurred on the House network. “My name is Samina Ashraf Gilani. I am stepmother of Abid, Imran, and Jamal Awan. My step children captivated me in house for a long time and during illness of my husband,” it began. She said the brothers were using their technology skills to wiretap and extort her. Gilani speaks only Urdu, and the first time I heard her voice, it was on a phone call with her cousin Syed Ahmed in Canada, where she’d fled to escape the Awans. I heard her sobbing in the background as she told her story to Syed, who translated for me. “They kept their stepmother in sort of illegal captivity from October 16, 2016, to February 2,” he explained.

  They installed a listening device under her kitchen counter. She took pictures of the sticky gum residue that remained after Imran finally agreed to remove the devices, and another contraption “behind the printer” of her computer. “She was told that her movements were under constant surveillance and conversations within the house and over the telephone were being listened to. They would repeat what she had told people to prove that they were really listening,” Syed said. They took her cell phone, but her sister smuggled her a burner phone in the mail, and she’d stand in the backyard to call extended family in Pakistan, begging for help.

  She wasn’t chained to the radiator; they kept her confined through high-tech surveillance and threats. It was a prison built around her status as a vulnerable immigrant and devout Muslim, using those traits to prey on her. Gilani was acculturated to a life of deference to male family members, she didn’t drive, and isolation meant she had nowhere to turn.

  Lying in a bed at Georgetown hospital dying of cancer, Muhammad cried out for his doting wife. Imran gave a bizarre response that stood out in the minds of multiple witnesses: “She said she can’t be bothered to come to the hospital. She is busy writing a book.” Then they told Gilani that Muhammad was refusing to see her.

  Gilani finally called the Fairfax County police. The officer who responded to her call recorded that her stepsons had “denied access” to her husband. Though it was the middle of a weekday, “her stepson Abid responded to location and was obviously upset with the situation. He stated he has full power of attorney over his father and produced an unsigned, undated document as proof. He refused to disclose his father’s location.”1 Police gave her a tracking number on a form she couldn’t read and left her alone with three grown men who were now seething.

  As part of a civil lawsuit, Gilani reported what happened next: “Right after the police left, Mr. Ashraf’s other son, Imran Awan, showed up and threatened me for calling the police. Imran Awan threatened that he is very powerful and if I ever call the police again, Imran Awan will do harm to me and my family members back in Pakistan and one of my cousins here in Baltimore. Imran Awan threatened that he has the power to kidnap my family members back in Pakistan. Worth mentioning here that Imran Awan introduces himself as someone from U.S. Congress or from federal agencies,” she wrote.

  She never saw her husband again and did not attend the supposed $300,000 funeral in Pakistan. I don’t know that I’d put Gilani in the category of a brave, independent woman, like Sumaira, Wendy, and Theresa. She’s guarded, as if the cloth burka that shrouded her body was wrapped around another invisible one that shielded her innermost thoughts. When she begged me for help at various times over the course of a year, I pointed out the obvious—that she could file criminal charges—but then she’d go silent. Other times, she’d ignore my requests for details about Imran’s activities that I was certain she’d know. One thing is for sure: by the very fact that she had survived all this, she’d exhibited a strength and perseverance greater than most of us will ever have to summon. Who was I to judge? If I were in her position—worn down by repeated failure, abuse, and expectations of subservience, the way Sean Moran was beat down by two decades of Capitol Hill skirmishing—would I do any better?

  On top of everything else, she was struggling to understand the United States, where she had spent the better part of the last eight years. The corruption and violence that defined her homeland wasn’t supposed to exist here. In America, you were supposed to be able to count on authorities.

  Speaking to Gilani through emails clumsily decoded to English using Google Translate was like receiving heartbreaking missives from another world. “Luke, my son,” one said. “You can’t imagine how they had captivated me. My husband gave me an iPhone which they ravished from me. It had pictures of my husband. They even took my diary, one of my husband’s memory. Can you get my diary back?”

  Muhammad Ashraf Awan’s final moments were not spent reminiscing with loved ones, but being pestered to sign his possessions, down to his 2004 Camry, over to his sons. After Muhammad died, the Awan brothers entered Gilani’s home and cleared it out of her two laptops and important papers, including her husband’s will.

  The title of Muhammad and Gilani’s Springfield residence listed Abid as a secondary owner and Gil
ani not at all, ensuring its ownership automatically transferred to him immediately following his father’s death. Gilani had no job, virtually no friends in the United States, no driver’s license, and now no spouse and no home. Imran and Abid owned six houses between them, but they took the home. When they changed the locks, they planted a flag like pirates: a blue decal, three feet in diameter, affixed immodestly facing outwards in a first floor window. It was an official seal surrounded by the text that read: “United States House of Representatives.”

  Gilani was homeless but knew that her husband had a $50,000 life insurance policy that named her as a beneficiary. When she called the insurance agent, he was alarmed. He told her that within hours of Muhammad’s death, someone else had claimed the money. When Muhammad died, Jamal, his youngest son, filed a death certificate falsely swearing that Muhammad was divorced. The next day, Abid used the certificate to file a claim, all before Gilani even knew her husband was dead.

  Muhammad had never consented to removing his wife as the beneficiary, but Gilani’s lawsuit eventually produced evidence documenting how the brothers had pulled off the caper. It was a video the brothers recorded in which they laughed while their heavily medicated father, hooked up to IV tubes, groggily signed a form making Abid the administrator, but not the beneficiary, of his $50,000 life insurance policy.

  I was struck by how every move the brothers made appeared to be plotted three steps in advance. What they were about to do would bring accusations of fraud and the video built an evidence trail to use in their favor. Abid used his administrative powers to modify the plan, removing Gilani as beneficiary and replacing her with himself.

  The callousness and greed inherent in this plot was sick. The brothers had little need for $50,000—the three cleared half a million a year in federal pay alone—and even less for a 2004 Camry. But that’s how Gilani wound up sleeping on Syed’s floor in Canada. Syed told me a little bit about Gilani’s upbringing and how happy she was to land in the U.S. Now, life with the Awans was so torturous that she chose to leave for another strange country to get away from them. As Democrats used talking points about cruelty in the immigration process in their war against Trump, he asked: “Can you imagine a lady left the United States to take refuge in a different country?” And it was all because of her treatment at the hands of congressional aides.

  I understood how much of a lifeline $50,000 would serve for a homeless widow, but I could tell there was more to the story. The insurance company suspected that Abid might be guilty of fraud and submitted the case to the Fairfax County courts to resolve. In court documents, Gilani wrote that the wrath she had incurred was leverage to force her to do something else. Imran “demanded me to sign a power of attorney for my Pakistani matters and was forcing me over the phone and through other people to sign power of attorney. I was put under tremendous pressure.”

  Imran wanted that power of attorney because Muhammad had vast wealth stored overseas. He owned two real estate developments the size of towns, known as the Gulshan-e-Moeen and Gulshan-e-Fareed in Pakistan.

  For a decade, Imran had been intimately involved in these big-money deals, but his name had been carefully kept off the paperwork. Among the benefits of storing their proceeds in their father’s name in Pakistan was that the FBI would not see the money and not be able to seize it. But that plan only worked as long as their father was alive. After his death, some of those assets were legally Gilani’s. Muhammad had made sure of that in his will. The brothers needed a Pakistani power of attorney to take ownership of his property and assets, and Gilani refused to grant it.

  Gilani was a simple woman who at times sought refuge in superstition—she said the number sixteen had special significance to Abid, implying that he might have pulled the plug on his father January 16 to get the money—but she wasn’t stupid. The Awans had taken her husband’s will and financial papers, but she knew his assets in Pakistan were valuable. She also knew that Imran’s threats weren’t bluster. In Pakistan, she’d seen how he received protection from armed government agents, and in America, he seemed to have important influence as well. She was smart enough to recognize that a meek, burka-clad woman stood little chance of navigating the easily corruptible Pakistani legal processes against savvy and rich stepsons who were cutthroat and singly focused like no one she had ever met.

  Even if she could afford a plane ticket to Pakistan, trying to claim the money herself was too risky in multiple ways. That $50,000, and the prospect of the chance to lay her head again in that Springfield, Virginia home was tempting. Sure, it’s a bad deal, but what’s the alternative? The brothers had calculated right again, and the widow, in a moment of weakness, told Imran she would sign the Pakistani power of attorney. Imran turned sweet, called her “mom,” and removed the listening devices in front of her. But the manipulation was a little too overt. She thought: “If you say you are my son, then why are you keeping my phone conversations listened to?” At the last moment, her sister convinced her it would be the wrong thing to do, and she didn’t sign it.

  Gilani, so she told me, knew giving in was wrong and that this wasn’t just about the money, but about how those boys had gotten it. Syed also convinced her to look beyond her immediate survival. “I am fighting to protect the country,” he said. “These are very bad people with such a greedy mentality. They can do anything for a single penny. This is what their nature is. If they had any opportunity to get some information from Congress, they would sell it to somebody.”

  Syed—who knew the brothers well and had even loaned Abid money—told me that Abid was sending iPads and iPhones to government officials in Pakistan. Imran “would entertain people from Pakistan, send gifts to the government officials. He used to come home and tell the dad ‘I sent such and such to the police or an official in Pakistan,’ ” he said. “A few months ago, Abid gave them so many iPhones to distribute.”

  * * *

  With the life insurance dispute tossed to the Virginia civil courts to decide, a judge set a deadline for Gilani to plead her side. It was a civil case and, just as the brothers had architected, she couldn’t afford a lawyer to handle it for her. Precisely because the brothers had so thoroughly fleeced her, it looked as if they’d get away with it. Gilani begged me—whether because she thought I had some sort of Washington connections, or simply because I was one of the few American-born people she knew—to connect her to a lawyer who’d work free of charge. But I’d just met her and didn’t think that was my role. If I knew the stakes back then, and how outgunned one side would be at every turn, I would have made a different choice.

  She missed the deadline. Soon after, a relative referred her to a lawyer who would take the case for what she could afford. But you get what you pay for. Gilani’s lawyer was Michael Hadeed—a convicted felon who had just had his law license reinstated after a long disbarment. Now, he was basically a small-time lawyer who’d take whatever work he could get—DUIs, divorce, traffic tickets—working out of an old rowhouse alongside his wife.

  If there are alpha males and beta males, Hadeed may be the first omega male. As I got to know him, I concluded that he committed his crime not because he was a bad person, but because he was a bad lawyer. Cheating was the only way he’d ever win a case. The way he wound up a convicted felon started with a former client who owned the King of Pita Bakery in Virginia. He didn’t pay his bill, so Hadeed let him work it off by arranging a ghost employee scheme in which the restauranteur would place visa applicants into fake jobs at the bakery. The bakery wrote paychecks to create a paper trail, but the money was returned in cash.

  Processing a work visa was easier than litigating real immigration petitions. When one man sought political asylum—a legally interesting and emotionally meaningful case—Hadeed said it would be “easier and faster” just to get him a work visa through the pita place. When the jig was up, Hadeed had a breakdown. “They’re coming for me next. I should have known. I shouldn’t have been in this,” he cried.

  On the
surface, the Awan insurance tort was a family dispute one step above small claims. That made Hadeed think he could handle it, and he was willing to do so for the meager amount of money that Gilani was able to borrow from a friend. But Hadeed raised his eyebrows when he saw that Abid had enlisted Jim Bacon, a powerhouse white-shoe attorney whose defense practice specialized in major international money laundering cases. What few realized is that, as Imran’s wife Sumaira told me, Bacon had been helping the Awans structure their money moves for years. Who among us doesn’t have an ongoing engagement with a money-laundering attorney? Hadeed had crossed paths with Bacon before, and Bacon was the kind of man who, a few decades earlier, might have beaten him up on a playground.

  Hadeed thought it was recklessly arrogant of the Awan brothers to pursue a lawsuit against their own stepmother for chump change at the same time they were subjects of investigations by the media, Congress, and the FBI. The civil suit opened them up to the legal process known as “discovery,” in which they would have to turn over almost any documents Hadeed demanded, including banking records, that were relevant to the case. The brothers knew that, but assumed Gilani would not fight back.

  I’d already come to the same realization, which is why I needed Hadeed so badly. By the time the wheels of justice rolled forward, I’d begun to realize that this story was bigger than I first thought, and the discovery process could be used to unearth crucial information about Congress’ inner workings. The Awans and Congress members had all refused to speak to me, but under oath in a deposition as part of this civil case, Abid would have no choice. I’d also realized that Gilani—whose wild stories told through broken English at first seemed over the top—wasn’t making this up and needed help. I’d never seen a woman so helpless, and so rightfully in despair, in my life.