by Luke Rosiak
But these lies diminishing Sumaira’s very existence were getting personal. She made the hardest decision of her life to turn against her own husband and pick up the phone and call me. Now, not only did Imran have two wives, but both had identified him as someone who controls people with threats.
Sumaira’s motivation was bigger than personal insult. As it became clearer that Imran had the entire Congress wrapped around his finger and was going to get away with it, he developed a cocky confidence. It was frightening to think what someone as prone to retaliation as Imran might do. “He’s going to get out of the situation with clean hands and put the victims in the bad situation,” Sumaira said.
Imran told her he had offers from three members of Congress to come back and work in the House, even as his felony trial loomed. “I am sure he will do the same again,” she said. She realized how extraordinary it would be for Democrats to put a cybersecurity violator back on their payroll. “If you don’t have a deep leverage with the people you are working with, you are not able to do that.” She summed up Democrats’ irrational refusal to condemn Imran as well as anyone could: “They’re not protecting him, they’re protecting themselves.”
As prosecutors continued to stall without charges, she began to see that Imran’s confidence was not unfounded. “They are prosecutors and the defense in one, there is no one on the other side. He’s the biggest vagabond in Pakistan. This is amazing, I don’t even have words. It seems like the whole case is upside down.”
Sumaira told me that after she called the Virginia police in June 2016—around the time the House investigation was heating up—to say she was being kept “like a slave,” she was so frightened of Imran that she retreated to the home of her father in Pakistan, where the family was so wealthy they had a servant who slept in the garage. When she returned to Virginia, Imran had stopped paying her rent and she became homeless. She couldn’t ask her family for help because the Sumaira they knew wouldn’t allow herself to be treated so poorly by a man, and based on the way they saw Imran speak in Pakistan, they believed she was married to an elite legislator. She wound up in the Patrick Henry shelter house, a home for abused women a few blocks from my apartment. Hina came by the homeless shelter to taunt her, saying “Bitch, I will never let you have a roof over your head.”
At the shelter, social workers quickly spotted her legal acumen and good character, paid for her to enroll in law school in the U.S., and placed her in county-supported transitional housing. It was a shining success story for the social services facility.
But Sumaira had one weakness: love. When Hina fled the country, Imran said she wasn’t coming back, and Sumaira hoped things would be different. She fell back into old patterns, with Imran staying most nights with her. But she began to realize she’d made a grave mistake. When I complimented her on her articulate and intelligent nature, she said, “If I were actually smart, I would have seen him for who he is a long time ago. I made a mistake. I mourn on my wisdom.” Imran installed hidden cameras in her apartment and began blackmailing her with videos of them having sex; videos she hadn’t known were being filmed, but which would cause her family in Pakistan to disown her if released.
“When Hina came back, I was with my kids and Imran at Popeye’s Halal Chicken in Sterling, and she showed up like she was coming to beat me, and I said to Imran, ‘I’m gonna call the police.’ ” Imran couldn’t allow that to happen. “He grabbed my phone. . . it was a huge scene, people were recording it.”
Sumaira was originally attracted to Imran’s outgoing personality and confidence, but eventually concluded that he was a master manipulator who cared only about money. Not long after the Popeye’s incident, Sumaira was in a minor fender bender. She was completely unharmed, but Imran became enraged, telling her that if she had any sense, she’d feign a back injury and file a claim against the other driver’s insurance. “You’ll get $30,000,” he said. When Sumaira told him that would be wrong, Imran went to her son. “Your mom doesn’t love you,” he said. “I want you to have presents and she doesn’t.”
In mid-2018, while prosecutors appeared to be treating Awan with kid gloves and negotiating a plea deal, he escalated his efforts to hide money. He asked Sumaira to create an LLC to stash assets for him, and even asked her and another relative to buy kilogram bricks of gold, worth $40,000 each, for him in New York. She said he was sending large sums of money to Saif Ullah Awan, a relative in Pakistan, and Saif Rao, a jeweler and import-export businessman in Queens, New York. Numerous other relatives told me the exact same thing.
If the FBI wanted to know where the money was going, Saif Rao was part of the answer. Saif Rao splits his time between New York and Pakistan, where his family owns a jewelry business. On Facebook, he posted pictured of gold bars between messages like: “To believers Allah blessed with Zum Zum and to the disbelievers, Urine of cow.” According to public records, Saif Rao also goes by the alias “Saif Iqbal,” and previously lived in California. In markers of possible money laundering, public records showed him associating himself with a bankrupt Christian church in Texas and a painting business in California, whose owner said he’d never heard of him. He had a federal tax lien placed against him for $1.1 million.
For years, Imran transferred money to Saif Rao. Sometimes to evade detection, it would go from an account in Hina’s name to one in Saif Rao’s brother’s name. In 2015, Sumaira was with Imran when he got a call from a bank that had flagged one of the transfers as suspicious. On Facebook, Saif Rao is friends with Haseeb Rana, the former IT aide whose father told me Imran had him doing the work of others. Rana is Indian and lived in Virginia, hours from Saif Rao’s New York home, so there is little reason for them to know each other except that Imran was controlling the money earned by his proxies on Capitol Hill, letting them keep a cut of their paychecks and directing some of the remainder to Saif Rao.
Sumaira also shed light on something else that I had suspected must have been true given how many nights Imran spent with her. When his other wife, Hina, filed the lawsuit against Imran in Pakistan just before returning to the U.S. to face indictment, her claim that she had been blindsided by his polygamy was a ruse. Hina had known about Imran’s other women for years. “He used to tell her everything regarding my bedroom and show her my videos. They are perfect for each other. Both care only about money,” Sumaira said. The Pakistani lawsuit appeared to be one more manipulation that would allow Hina to establish herself as a victim if it came to it, or perhaps to file for divorce and gain access to the Pakistani assets herself.
TWENTY
JEFF SESSIONS IS MR. MAGOO
It wasn’t just the media who Speaker Paul Ryan and Chairman Gregg Harper never told what happened. Rank-and-file Republicans—who would have demanded justice, ensured a thorough investigation, and made it a campaign issue—had no clue what had occurred.
Police told Chairman Harper’s Committee on House Administration in June 2017 that they had no plans to conduct further interviews even though many people with knowledge of wrongdoing had never been approached. Despite that, Chairman Harper continued to defer to prosecutors, telling me as late as April 2018 that it was “in the hands of the Department of Justice.” Chairman Harper knew as well as anyone the extent of the wrongdoing that had occurred. Didn’t he suspect something might have gone awry? What did he think prosecutors had been doing for the last year? If they were done gathering evidence, then why didn’t they either close out the case as unfounded, or go ahead and finally charge someone?
Apparently to Chairman Harper—a former prosecutor—the “ongoing” status of the investigation meant that his fellow Republicans couldn’t be informed of even the barest outlines of what had occurred. This was akin to claiming you couldn’t tell a murder victim’s loved ones that the person was dead until a conviction was secured in the killing. The notion that congressmen couldn’t opine on a case until it had wound its way through the courts plainly didn’t apply to his Democratic colleagues, who were constantly talkin
g about purported collusion between Trump and Russia. And certainly, the chairman’s fellow Republicans had seen enough instances of politicized conduct by the FBI in the 2016 election to make clear that oversight was often appropriate and necessary.
When I met with the vice chair of the committee, Representative Rodney Davis, the genial young Illinois legislator and former congressional staffer was quick to project a top-secret, 007 vibe, as if the invocation of secrecy made him feel important. “I just can’t talk about it, because it’s an ongoing investigation,” he said. But as I rattled through some facts of the case, basic elements seemed to both trip him up and pique his interest. “The House Democratic Caucus? What do they have to do with this?”
I paused. “Sir, it sounds like you can’t not talk about it because you’re not allowed to. You can’t talk about it because you don’t know a thing about it.”
He laughed. “I guess you’re right. This is really troubling stuff, and I wish I had been informed of it. Can I get a copy of that IG report?” Even the second-in-command on the committee with direct oversight of the House’s IT scandal didn’t have the slightest clue what this was all about. That made it impossible to realize the perversity of the response. Representative Davis was interested to know more and wanted to help. But it was not his place to cross the chairman.
Scrutiny might have come from other bodies like the Intelligence Committee, led by the tough investigator Representative Devin Nunes of California, except that the executive branch has no shortage of ways to neuter congressional oversight. The FBI told the Intelligence Committee that the Awans had no connections to foreign government officials despite running a car dealership that took money from an Iraqi government minister, wiring money to a Pakistani cop, sending devices to Pakistani government officials, convincing Pakistanis that he was a White House employee, and receiving protection from armed Pakistani government agents. By making that assertion, the Bureau left Nunes no choice but to consider the case outside of his jurisdiction.
The inbred nature of Congress also meant that when it came to a scandal in their own backyard, ordinarily tough investigators had personal conflicts. Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the oversight committee, was out of the question because of his close relationship with Chief Administrative Officer Kiko, and Representative Gowdy visibly recoiled when I asked him about the case.
That left the House Freedom Caucus, a rowdy coalition of Republicans often described as the most conservative in the House, but who in reality are defined by a more nuanced trait: an independence that makes them more willing than any members of either party to pursue their convictions instead of bowing to the House Speaker or minority leader. If anything, you could say that these members were less “Republican” than their colleagues. They did what they felt was right, and if Speaker Ryan didn’t like it, well, he didn’t elect them. They were often joined by other members like Representatives Thomas Massie and Matt Gaetz, who harbored libertarian-leaning views that overlapped with liberal positions at times. What bonded them together was, more than anything, the notion that being one of the 435 House members should mean more than just falling into line behind Paul Ryan or Nancy Pelosi.
These Republican congressmen were not happy that their leadership hadn’t told them about the frightening events in their own chamber. Some of them, such as Representative Ron DeSantis of Florida and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio—a dark-horse candidate for Speaker of the House himself—demanded that the House conduct oversight hearings on the House’s IT scandal. But Speaker Ryan’s leadership team intervened to block them.1 Fearing for the integrity of the legislative body, the members resorted to hijacking the Oversight Committee’s room for a rogue, unsanctioned hearing. They smuggled in cameras at the last minute, fearing a typical audiovisual request would alert leadership that something was going on. I testified as the main witness, shocking members of Congress with events that had occurred beneath their noses.2 My information came largely from official House documents that their fellow Republicans had refused to share with them. The rest came from fairly straightforward investigative follow-up that no one else seemed to have done.
Being sought out by congressmen who wanted to pick my brain was an odd reversal for a reporter accustomed to chasing them down hallways to ask for information. But they deserved to know. I began briefing a group of a dozen congressmen, led by Representatives Louie Gohmert of Texas and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, sometimes over Texas barbeque. These congressmen were different from the others I’d encountered. They didn’t care if the truth made the House, Democrats, or Republicans look bad. They only cared about getting the facts, and they took the extraordinary obstruction as a sign that they were onto something big, not that they should back off. Most important, unlike members of Congress who seemed to want to pass the buck to others wherever possible and then take credit later if it became advantageous, these congressmen were willing to put in the effort to find the truth. Unlike members like Chairman Harper, these congressmen often did the work themselves rather than ceding large portions of their responsibilities to staff.
Both Representatives Gohmert and Perry came from military backgrounds. Representative Gohmert was a judge and is an active member of the Judiciary Committee. Physically, he is unimposing: a balding sixy-four-year-old with a slow Texas drawl. But it didn’t take long to see that his power came from his mind, which had an uncanny ability to file away every fact, date, and claim he heard, stored in an internal database constantly being mined for discrepancies and problems. When it came to government corruption, if you were on the wrong side of one of these facts, Representative Gohmert’s questioning came like a roaring M-16 in the Iraq desert.
Representative Perry was a member of the committees on foreign affairs and homeland security. He has a work ethic that rivaled Imran Awan’s superhuman industriousness, having been working since the age of thirteen, and put himself through college while holding a full-time job. But unlike worn-down veterans of Congress, the tall, skinny Perry somehow managed to reach his fifties with a wry smile and impossible youthfulness about him. He was always eager to take on Washington dysfunction, even if it meant losing again and again. While Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving, Samina Gilani, and the many House staffers who told me they knew what was going on but that there was no point coming forward, had stopped fighting because it was clear the fix was in, what made Representatives Gohmert and Perry different is that they felt such battles were still worth fighting—for the principle of it, and in the off chance that maybe, someday, the Swamp could be overcome.
House leadership was not providing answers to their questions about the Awan case. But while Representatives Gohmert and Perry knew that hiding the facts from Congress’ rank-and-file helped facilitate a DOJ cover-up, at the end of the day, congressional oversight wasn’t what was needed. This was a serious criminal matter and it needed less politics, not more. This needed to be handled by someone with the power to jail people, and quickly. On March 1, 2018, the pair met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Criminal Division Stephen Richardson, and a few other FBI and DOJ aides about the case, demanding to know how clear-cut evidence of crimes on Capitol Hill was not resulting in prosecution. Sessions promised to get to the bottom of it but was fed blatantly untrue answers by the FBI. Most of Sessions’ staff seemed to accept those answers at face value.
At the meeting, in front of Sessions, Representative Gohmert gave the FBI a binder of documentation including a list of sources who had critical information. This included information about claims by Stephen Taylor, the fellow Democratic IT aide who said he had firsthand knowledge of Imran selling access to congressional offices. His testimony could support an attempted bribery charge. Most attention-grabbing to the average person, he also saw Imran going into the DNC headquarters on a regular basis as if he were secretly working there.
The media constantly claimed that my reporting on the Awan matter was aimed at somehow disputing the DNC narrative, somethi
ng they could not have thought if they had actually read any of my sixty articles, which clearly focused on the House Democratic Caucus and House servers, not the DNC. They would be shocked to know that I did have credible information about the DNC and deliberately decided not to report it, figuring if I stayed away from this controversial topic, surely they’d acknowledge the events in the House that I was documenting, events that in my mind were just as serious. I was getting played.
But as it became more obvious how Imran and his family inappropriately blurred the lines between various offices in the House, under-the-table DNC moonlighting would fit the pattern. That’s not to say that Imran took the DNC emails, but if he was working there while on the taxpayer clock to save the bankrupt DNC some money, it could be illegal, and it seemingly should have come up in any thorough investigation into the DNC hack. By this time, President Trump’s campaign was being sued by the DNC, which alleged that it worked with Russia to hack the political group. “Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails,” Trump tweeted, giving Imran one of his signature nicknames.3 What Trump didn’t know is that Sessions’ FBI had information that might expose misconduct at the DNC and be advantageous to Trump, but never pursued the lead.
In the meeting, the FBI called the Awans “the Family,” like the mafia. The congressmen were told teams from three different divisions of the FBI were working the case, probing public corruption and national security as well as bank fraud. One of those teams was the counter-intelligence unit—the same unit led by Peter Strzok, who made key decisions on the Clinton emails and Trump-Russia cases and promised to “stop” Trump from becoming president. Now the unit’s failure to talk to even basic witnesses was starting to make sense.