Obstruction of Justice

by Luke Rosiak

  This time, the agent who summoned her had one incredible request: do not bring any evidence to the meeting. We don’t want any documents.

  When she got to the room with Special Agent Spencer Brooks, Marando, and the Capitol Police, the questions were direct: Are you talking to members of Congress? What work materials do you have at your home? It seemed like a trap. Lying to the FBI is a crime, and while Theresa had no nondisclosure agreement and was free to say what happened, she knew there were risks. Her words could be twisted, they could make an issue out of notes she retained, or they could find some other issue.

  At the meeting, Marando lifted a folder, pulled a document from it, and brandished it like a cop revealing a gotcha to a suspect. The folder contained information Theresa had given to Jeff Session’s aide, Rachael Tucker, and that she had apparently simply handed over to the FBI. Of all the documents in the stack, Marando was interested in only one: the timeline showing that Pelosi’s and Ryan’s offices had been amply warned of the findings. He pulled it out and slid it across the table as if to say well how do you explain this, tootsie? “Who wrote this?” he asked.

  “Why do you want to know?” Theresa said. “I wrote it. It’s based on my calendar.”

  “Why did you give it to the AG’s office?”

  She didn’t understand the problem. “What would you have had me do?” she said. “Don’t you work for him?” It was clear the dynamic of the meeting had changed. The room went silent.

  “We figure you’re an ally, someone we could bounce things off,” Marando said, even though they had told her almost nothing about what they had found, making it impossible for her to provide guidance. “But you don’t have to be here.”

  “Exactly,” Theresa said. “If you’re working this case, why am I talking to you instead of a grand jury?”

  Stunningly, Marando seemed to imply that if Theresa, the sterling-credentialed key investigator in the case, went before a grand jury, it would be as a target. “We would have called you to the grand jury, but we didn’t want to put you on the spot and make you have to get counsel. Do you have a lawyer? They can be expensive. We thought it would be better to have you as a friendly.”

  “Why would I get counsel? Are you accusing me of something?” Theresa responded. “I sat on the other side of the table where you’re sitting for twenty-five years, and that stunt where you whipped out the folder two hours in? That’s my move. And that’s why I wanted those people’s emails. So I would have answers and could whip out my folder on them.”

  “If you’re thinking of making me a scapegoat on this or suggesting I don’t have integrity…” she said. Just as Imran framed his victims in Pakistan, the DOJ might be intending to blame the only investigator who actually pursued this case in order to explain their own inaction.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Speaker Ryan’s office was alerted to the members’ request for the SCIF briefing. The Republican speaker’s team wanted Democrats present at the briefing, which would likely eat up all the limited time they had with antagonistic obstruction. Speaker Ryan also alerted Chairman Gregg Harper, who’d been telling me he was on top of the case. Harper, whose position as head of the Administration Committee necessitated his attendance more than anyone else, didn’t bother to attend.

  The FBI’s assertion that the briefing could only be held in a SCIF signaled that highly classified information was about to be shared. In other words, that the FBI had found something concerning national security. That was enough to garner interest from more members, including Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. Whatever was learned in that meeting is unknown to me because members are prohibited from sharing what they learn in classified settings.

  Before the door closed, members were instructed that no notes could be taken. It’s customary to disallow cell phones and electronics into the SCIF, but they were told that no paper, no writing implements, nothing to make any record would be allowed, which was not customary. Members of Congress would not be allowed to review notes of what they were told—a valuable record should the FBI change its story—and they had to discard the carefully considered questions they had prepared. Five FBI-affiliated personnel were present. Members were not allowed to record their names or what their involvement was with the case.

  If the FBI had evidence that necessitated a secure setting, it wasn’t reflected in the prosecutors’ charges. It seemed the whole point of holding the meeting in a SCIF was to appease members with an explanation they couldn’t cross-reference with people who could poke holes in it; people like me, Theresa, or one of the Awans’ relatives.

  The Awan court date was postponed a seventh time to June 7. For once, it didn’t seem to be scheduled for a date when it would go unnoticed, like a holiday weekend. But a few days before, I saw otherwise. The DOJ revealed that its long-awaited inspector general’s report on the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails would be released just before the Awans’ court date. It was brilliant: the very same people who were interested in the Awan case—mainly conservatives who saw the Department of Justice as being infected with pro-Democrat bias—would be having a field day diving into the three hundred-page report. It would be the perfect time to let Imran off the hook.

  Nonetheless, Representatives Gohmert and Perry asked for another meeting with Sessions, but the only time it could be scheduled was a day before the court date. Sessions would listen, but it sure seemed to me at this point like it was for no reason but to make the congressmen feel heard.

  Before the meeting, it was announced that the DOJ IG report on Clinton’s emails would be delayed. The Awans' court date was also postponed to the day before the Fourth of July holiday. Whereas before, the postponements had talked about “voluminous discovery” and negotiating over attorney-client privilege issues, the court papers recording this delay implied that a deal was in the works.

  On June 13, Representatives Gohmert and Perry spoke with Sessions on the phone. They asked Sessions to have a trusted personal advisor review the facts with Theresa. The AG needed to see the facts without the FBI’s filter. Then, if the AG still believed there was no case, and that the FBI had presented the facts accurately, they would be satisfied because they knew Jeff Sessions to be a man of honor. The AG agreed to their simple request. “I’m not afraid to take them on. If laws were broken, they must be prosecuted,” Sessions said.

  But I wondered: why would Theresa trust Sessions’ people any more than she trusted the FBI, given what happened when she talked to Rachael Tucker?

  The question, it turned out, was moot, as the opportunity was never presented to Theresa. Sessions had again tasked none other than Tucker with the follow-through since she had been listening in on the call, and his staff defied his order. No one from Sessions’ staff would be going over the facts to see how they meshed with the spin the FBI was feeding the attorney general. Tucker claimed to Representative Gohmert’s staff that there never was any such promise, and said she merely asked the FBI about the case one more time and was told there was no case other than bank fraud. Sessions was being poorly served not only by the FBI, but even by his innermost staff.

  Tucker had caught the disease. It was a den of revolving-door nepotism where no one wanted to ask hard questions or confront people with uncomfortable truths, people they intended to work in close quarters with. Tucker felt like she had to remain on good terms with the FBI, and she didn’t want to go up against its officials.

  TWENTY-ONE

  COVER-UP

  By May 2018, there was no doubt that Paul Ryan’s earlier statements on the case didn’t hold water. His spokeswoman, AshLee Strong’s, emails to me dodged the issue of why the House preordained it a “theft” investigation before investigators could possibly have ruled out a hack; prior to having looked at the data flying off the House network, or even at the copy of the House Democratic Caucus server they’d made before it went missing. Strong refused to say there eve
n was any cybersecurity investigation, reiterating that it was a theft probe. At first, I took this as a bold-faced lie. But by now I realized she was telling the truth, which was even worse. It came down to semantics. Her description of it as a theft probe didn’t deny that cybersecurity violations occurred, only that they weren’t being investigated. Anyone who’d witnessed the bumbling actions of the FBI and Capitol Police could see this was true. No problem has ever been solved when people refuse to acknowledge that it exists, so even though server logs and official documents showed cybersecurity violations, obviously the House wasn’t taking corrective action.

  But that wasn’t the end of the insanity out of the Speaker’s office. Strong claimed that the reason the suspects were left on the network for seven months after problems were known was because the police were conducting a sting. Intentionally letting a hack continue during the height of an election was like police saying they’d let a killer rack up a few more bodies to make the prosecution easier. But since she was refusing to acknowledge any cybersecurity rule violations, I’ll assume she meant a sting to catch theft and fraud. That wasn’t any better. At the end of the sting, the entire family was banned from Congress, obviously suggesting they had found something. So then where were the theft charges?

  If they hadn’t found anything during this lengthy sting—one that conveniently delayed action until the most politically convenient time—then it was no wonder. The premise of a sting is that the suspects don’t know they’re being watched, and House authorities couldn’t possibly have thought that was true. Even the Democratic staffer of the Administration Committee, Eddie Flaherty, was telling people during that time period that the suspects were coming by to speak with his boss about how they were under investigation. Abid had even been fired by Representative Clarke's office. Representative Xavier Becerra had ordered Abid to stop logging into his computers.

  Though Democrats said months into the probe that Awans couldn’t be interviewed because the investigation was so top secret that even the congressmen couldn’t know, those members seemed to know about it from the moment it began. Records show that as soon as the probe was initiated in April 2016, House members began paying CDW-G hundreds of thousands of dollars in invoices that were more than a year overdue, indicating that they were seeking to clean it up. Mark Takano of California paid $28,000 of delinquent invoices, some dating as far back as 2014. The figures for Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Jackie Speier of California were nearly as bad. It was obvious from the way they’d treated Imran since—particularly Representatives Wasserman Schultz, Clarke, and Meeks—that if Imran didn’t already know about the investigation, one or more of these members would have tipped him off. Even prosecutors said that when Hina and Imran wired $300,000 to Pakistan, the pair “likely knew they were under investigation at that time.”

  Speaker Ryan’s office knew this was a significant issue. My emails to Strong were opened two hundred times in numerous locations. She responded: “I needed to track a few more things down on this. I’ll send response tomorrow.” But whatever information she found seemed to change her mind about responding.

  A few days later, Speaker Ryan had scheduled a press conference on the topic of cybersecurity in politics alongside FBI Director Christopher Wray. I intended to ask about Imran, but the event was cancelled at the last minute, so I attended Ryan’s weekly press conference instead. The press conference’s first discussion focused on the fact that the special counsel’s Russia probe turned one year old that day, leading Republicans to say that it needed to make its findings and wrap up. The Awan investigation had been going on for twice as long, with House officials hiding behind the “ongoing” nature of it to completely avoid talking about it.

  I planned my question to circumvent that trap, focusing on choices made by House officials before the criminal investigation. As soon as I said my name, Speaker Ryan inhaled sharply. “In the House, there was this issue of Imran Awan, the Democratic IT aide,” I said. “I’ve come learn that the House IG was briefing you guys in the House from July onwards.” The police weren’t brought in until October, and “he was left on the network until shortly after the election. Can you address why?”

  “That’s a question you would ask the people who made those decisions,” he responded.

  I did a double take. That was you, I thought. “But I’m asking on why you guys waited in the House—the Administration Committee and your office—to involve the police.”

  “I’m not going to comment on an ongoing police investigation,” he said. Speaker Ryan was smart enough to know that this was circular logic, but so few people understood the situation that no other reporter in the room was going to call him on it. I brought with me to the press conference a colleague from the Daily Caller News Foundation to increase the odds that one or both of us would get to ask a question. After I asked mine, Strong came around the side of the podium and took a picture of my colleague, as if to flag that he shouldn’t be called on. He wasn’t.

  The establishment forces were getting desperate. They knew that if they acknowledged the facts of this astonishing case, a plea deal simply couldn’t be justified. The basics of this simply didn’t take much investigating. The House financial records that were systematically falsified plainly constituted false statements on government documents. The server logs clearly showed unauthorized access. If people realized that these things had occurred without consequences, well, if there are sanctuary cities, Paul Ryan was running a sanctuary Congress.

  Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko’s press secretary, Dan Weiser, had for a year now refused to let me speak with the House official, saying the office was prohibited from releasing statements of any kind dealing with an ongoing investigation or internal affairs. I was tired of it. I saw how lazy the rest of the media were, and how satisfied they were to merely write down official statements and leave it at that. Plainly, this was no ordinary investigation, and ordinary reporting techniques were getting nowhere.

  At 6:30 p.m. just after Memorial Day 2018, I told my wife I’d either be back in ten minutes or several hours. I hopped in my car to make the mile-long drive to Phil Kiko’s house. I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts and let the humid summer air rush through the open windows as I made my way to what can only be described as a run-down shack on the side of a highway where Kiko, who grossed $170,000 a year, lived with his wife Colleen, who made a similar government salary. In the gravel driveway, which formed the entirety of the front yard, were cars with bumper stickers for a Republican candidate running in Maryland. Also in the front yard of the Arlington, Virginia, home was a black SUV with D.C. tags—the kind VIPs drive. Kiko is close to several congressmen, and I worried he might be entertaining one. If so, this was about to go very poorly.

  But I also knew that in September 2017, the Senate had confirmed his wife Colleen to a high-level appointment as chair of the Federal Labor Relations Authority in a unanimous vote. While struggling to understand Kiko’s exceptional failures in the Awan case, it briefly crossed my mind that perhaps he feared that if he didn’t bend over backwards for Democrats in the Awan case, they’d block his wife’s confirmation, which would only require one objection. It was only speculation, but because of it, I took the gamble that the SUV belonged to Colleen and not a visitor, and that she was at home cooking up some dinner. It was just what I had hoped.

  Sure enough, Colleen opened the door and smiled pleasantly: “Hi.” I smiled back. “I’m Luke Rosiak. I know Phil from work.”

  “Oh, nice to meet you!” she said. “I was just about to serve up dinner. Would you like to come in?”

  I sniffed the air. “Mmm,” I said. “Smells delicious. I’d love to join you.”

  She led me to the dining room table. “Honey, Luke’s here!”

  “Nooooooooooo,” Phil howled.

  Colleen was afraid she’d made a grave mistake, as if I were an ax murderer. Her eyes flashed. “Get out!” she said. I backed out the door and she slammed it behind me.


  But a few seconds later, I heard the door unlock, and out stepped Phil. For forty minutes while enduring a dozen mosquito bites, we stood by the side of the highway. “I figured you’d come by eventually,” he said.

  “It’s a big deal, and someone’s got to look into it.”

  “I know it is. I don’t blame you.”

  I told him what I knew. “They’re saying you made it up, that there never was any missing server.”

  “I don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t tell us anything. It’s in the hands of the police,” he said.

  “But you know what you saw,” I replied. It was ridiculous. Kiko was the one who wrote a letter saying the server was missing. There was no way it went un-missing without him being consulted. If he really was just hearing this for the first time, he should have been more bothered than he was.

  “I just want you to know, I’m a good investigator,” he said sadly.

  But when I told him other specifics I’d learned, he stared blankly.

  “Look, the Democrats are going to blame this whole thing on you,” I said. “They’re saying you failed to enforce the rules, to keep tabs on what’s going on, and now they’re saying you framed these guys, planted evidence. Don’t you see this is going to backfire on you?”

  “We’ll see what happens,” he said.

  “I just needed to warn you that after this story goes up, you’re probably going to be threatened by Wasserman Schultz again.”

  A few days later, I published the story about what multiple people heard firsthand from Kiko: that in the early days of the investigation, Representative Wasserman Schultz had put her finger to his chest, demanded that he drop the probe, and called him an “Islamophobe.”

  By the time I got to the office that morning, I had five missed calls from Kiko’s spokesman; the one who was previously unable to speak. If I didn’t remove the story from the internet, they were going to put out a statement calling me a liar, he said.