Obstruction of Justice

by Luke Rosiak

  Just as I warned him the Democrats would, Dominguez singled out rubber-spine Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko, who had bent over backwards to accommodate Democrats in the investigation. Dominguez rewarded him by calling him a “Speaker Ryan-appointed . . . right-wing extremist.”

  Outside the doors of the courthouse after these sentencing pleas were heard, I gave a television interview to One America News, the only network in attendance. As the cameras rolled, a court security guard emerged. Badge on his chest, he walked into the shot and said “OAN is not a real network. They’re not fair.” It was a surreal and fitting symbol of the partisans embedded in the justice system from the highest to the lowest levels.

  The same day Imran Awan was sentenced to three months of probation for bank fraud, Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was convicted of eight crimes in an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that was supposed to find collusion with Russia, but instead found bank fraud, tax fraud, and failing to report foreign assets—all of which the Awan family had also done. Manafort faced up to 240 years in prison. On the same day, Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to eight crimes, largely involving making a false statement to a financial institution and tax fraud. Again, things the Awans had also done. The plea deal came with three to five years in prison, and Cohen took it under threat of a much longer term.6

  It was a “nightmare news day” for Trump, Vox reported.

  Trump highlighted two tiers of justice, lamenting: “Somebody made a better deal: Awan, the IT guy for Congresswoman Shultz. He had all the info on Democrats, all the info on everyone. He went to jail holding the hands of the Justice Department and the FBI, they sat there together smiling and laughing, and he got nothing. And he stole money. And he had more information on corruption of the Democrats than anyone, and they don’t even have his computers and his servers. They gave him nothing.”

  “Double standard!? I mean, he was worse than anybody, in my opinion. The reason he got nothing is because the Dems are very strong in the Justice Department. I put in an attorney general that never took control of the Justice Department — Jeff Sessions — and it’s kind of an incredible thing.”

  Sessions responded: “While I am Attorney General, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations. I demand the highest standards, and where they are not met, I take action.”7

  But Trump seemed to see what Sessions could not: “Jeff Sessions said he wouldn’t allow politics to influence him only because he doesn’t understand what is happening underneath his command position.”8

  A justice system not influenced by politics is what we all want, but this day showed it as clear as could be: that’s not the one we have.

  TWENTY-THREE

  AFTERMATH

  So that’s how I wound up here, talking and mourning with Sumaira on this Fourth of July. Tonight, the fireworks’ climax didn’t seem so spectacular. The truth is, I didn’t even recognize it as the grand finale until what stood out to me was the silence and the crickets. Maybe I was just jaded. After what I’d seen, it’d take a lot to surprise me.

  People whose job it was to take swift action had turned out to be cowards. People who could have looked the other way showed unfathomable courage while facing retaliation or threats. Confronting the swamp means stepping into quicksand: the more you fight, the deeper it drags you down.

  I am fatigued, like everyone else. This swamp was too deep to drain. Theresa, who had been fighting this battle longer than I had, was hiring a lawyer. Samina Gilani was homeless. Sumaira was praying for safety and a fresh start. People like Sean Moran were still phoning it in.

  The brothers' plan to get Gilani out of the way and seize the assets hidden in their father's name was not deterred in the slightest by the Fairfax County judge's ruling that Abid and Jamal submitted a death certificate that falsely claimed their father was not married to Gilani. Abid simply ignored the ruling and repeated the lie on public probate documents even as prosecutors drafted the exoneration statement for the family. In May of 2018, Abid attested to Fairfax County that his father was unmarried, that he had no will, that no one else was seeking his assets, and that his estate was worth exactly zero dollars. He was appointed as administrator. Hina also went back to Fairfax County court, in her case to change her name, making it more difficult to tie her to these activities. She now goes by Tina Alvi.

  Sumaira finally secured a divorce from Imran in exchange for the unemployed single mother giving her car to the supposed international charity magnate. It signified the return of her dowry.

  Imran claims he has job offers to return to Capitol Hill. Congressional chiefs of staff like Shelley Davis of Yvette Clarke’s office have not been charged with procurement fraud. Members of Congress who seemed to know of problems before authorities did but didn’t step up, like Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, were poised to ascend to the Senate and the governor’s mansion, respectively. Xavier Becerra was now attorney general of California and a potential future presidential candidate. Another Awan employer, Hakeem Jeffries, would go on to be elected chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, and Pelosi, of course, would assume the speakership.

  The House's penchant for protecting current members of both parties paid off for Representative Yvette Clarke during the 2018 primary election in Brooklyn, when she narrowly escaped losing to a more progressive young outsider from the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, just as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated the congressman in the neighboring district. Representative Clarke won by a mere one thousand votes. If it weren't for the House's extraordinary secrecy about ten percent of Clarke's budget disappearing under the most suspicious possible circumstances, her Democratic opponent could almost certainly have moved the needle enough to defeat her. Instead, the Uniparty of entrenched incumbents remains intact.

  I return home and kiss my daughter goodnight. Now walking and with a personality of her own, she wasn’t even born when this began. I think of the future. Where do I go from here? What can be done to get politics out of our justice system? Will America, in her lifetime, ever become a place—perhaps the first in history—where the connected elite are beholden to the same set of rules as the rest of us?

  Some people say things have to get worse before they can get better. The DOJ’s handling of this case makes clear that the bias displayed in the 2016 Clinton and Trump investigations is not an aberration, but a plague, and Jeff Sessions was not the man to cure it. Speaker Ryan is on his way out, he says to spend more time with his family in Wisconsin, though it remains to be seen whether his next job will have a Washington address or not. His willingness to capitulate to Democrats in this case, even if it meant handing the presidency to Hillary Clinton, casts a permanent shadow on his legacy and bolsters the sense—widespread among Trump supporters—that establishment Republicans can’t be trusted.

  Other people say that this problem is behind us, that Imran Awan and his clan are off the House network, and none of this matters. These are the same people who were never going to tell you that any of these extraordinary events occurred at all. But as I lie awake at night, I think about all I’ve learned, and how what I’ve told you isn’t even the half of it.

  Do they even know that the Awan group’s relatives and associates continue to occupy sensitive IT roles in the federal government, including one who got a top-secret intelligence contract with the Obama White House despite the fact that his previous position was operating a car dealership? That another associate won a multimillion-dollar Department of Defense contract (in fact, he got preference for it by invoking his status as an ethnic minority)? That a former roommate runs IT for the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection?

  Do they want to know?

  This is the story of a cover-up, manipulation, and the subversion of justice, and it is a true one in a world where true stories often don’t have happy end
ings. But one conclusion seems clear: the DOJ, Democrats, and some establishment Republicans are all on the same team. One where insiders go along to get along.

  If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that the so-called “Deep State” isn’t about Democrats versus Republicans, it’s about entrenched insiders and the lengths they’ll go to keep their hold on power.

  EPILOGUE

  Nothing has changed. Two years after the Committee on House Administration was informed of the systematic falsification of invoices, it held its first-ever hearing related to the incident.

  Holding the gavel was Gregg Harper, who was set to leave Congress in January 2018 without ever publicly saying the name “Awan.” Chairman Harper deferred generously throughout the hearing to ranking member Bob Brady, who likewise never said “Awan” publicly. Representative Brady did not run for re-election in 2018 after becoming the target of an FBI probe involving allegedly paying his opponent to drop out of his 2016 race.

  These are the same men who oversaw the House’s sexual harassment settlement slush fund— designed to silence victims—and then took credit for abolishing it. But as of this writing, it has not been eliminated at all. Representative Ron DeSantis proposed an aggressive bill that would name the lawmakers, like Representative Meeks, who were the subject of past settlements, and make them repay them. This effort was dismissed, and in February 2018, Chairman Harper teamed with Representative Brady for a much more modest reform. But six months later, it was held up in secret talks in a departure from typical congressional procedures. Chairman Harper boasted that progress is being made nonetheless: members, staff, and even interns now have to sit through human resources “training” about harassment, as if a multiple-choice test asking whether harassment is good or bad would solve the whole thing. Aggressive oversight indeed.

  At the belated hearing on congressional information security, before the committee were Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving, Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko, and the inspector general who replaced Theresa, Michael Ptasienski.

  Ptasienski explained that system administrators like Awan “hold the ‘keys to the kingdom,’ meaning they can create accounts, grant access, view, download, update, or delete almost any electronic information within an office.”

  “A rogue system administrator could inflict considerable damage to an office and potentially disclose sensitive information, perform unauthorized updates, or simply export or delete files,” he continued. “A rogue system administrator could take steps to cover up his or her actions and limit the possibility that their behavior being detected or otherwise traced back to them.”

  Kiko testified that experts found “two dozen” problems with the way the House supervised their computer administrators. “Enforcement gaps range from improper vetting of the employees themselves, to unfettered access to House accounts and use of non-approved software and/or cloud services, to the use of unauthorized equipment. . . far too many have privileged access to the House network with little to no supervision,” he said.

  Chairman Harper declared: “We just can’t have this ever happen again.”

  The trio reminded him that, in a sense, this was again. Twice before, the committee had learned of procurement or IT scams that took advantage of the part-time “shared employee” system. They had pledged reforms and didn’t follow through. In 2008, for example, “shared employee” bookkeeper Laura Flores was convicted of defrauding members of $200,000. The case included suspicion of unethical conduct by two congresswomen, sisters Loretta and Linda Sanchez. “I think this has been a great wake-up call,” Republican Congressman Vernon Ehlers of Michigan, then the ranking member of the Administration Committee, said at the time. “I think all members should learn a lesson from this and I’m sure they will.” They didn’t.

  This time around, Democrats had one favored solution: throwing money at the abstract problem of cybersecurity. Members of Congress pledged “$10 million in additional funding to the [CAO] in order to enhance their cybersecurity program.”1 The money did nothing to address the most serious known incident. And with no real punishment even for the Awans, anyone could see that there was no deterrent.

  Kiko lectured: “The bookend to the outside threat is the insider threat. Tremendous efforts are dedicated to protecting the House against these outside threats, however these efforts are undermined when these employees do not adhere to and thumb their nose at our information security policy, and that’s a risk in my opinion we cannot afford.”

  But Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk of Georgia seemed to sense that these policies were toothless. “Especially if they disclose information we have on constituents or information we’re working on. . . . Does [the policy] spell out what penalties there are, i.e. you can go to jail?”

  “There aren’t any penalties,” the CAO replied.

  Kiko hid his frustration as he was forced to explain to members of Congress why there were no repercussions for bad actors he was supposed to be supervising, when those members knew full well that it was because their colleagues were protecting rulebreakers. “Termination, now it’s the member’s responsibility. . . . We can revoke everything, but they could still be employed,” he said in an obvious reference to Wasserman Schultz. “House officers cannot compel background checks or compliance with applicable House policies.”

  Months before, Chairman Harper and Representative Brady had offloaded their work— just as the committee had done in so many cases before—onto a group of unelected people working in secret, in this case a “working group” of Kiko, Irving, and the other usual suspects. They would tell the committee what to do, and the committee would presumably rubber-stamp it while giving members the ability to disavow any role in crafting it, should that become politically convenient.

  The working group was clear that the vulnerabilities which emerged in the Awan affair would never go away unless the entire employment category that Imran exploited—that of the “shared” IT employee—was forever abolished. “It is impossible to eliminate the vulnerabilities posed by the use of shared employees without making significant changes to the employment structure itself,” Kiko said. A lack of oversight was inherent to someone working part-time for many different members of Congress, and with disciplinary measures only possible with full consent of those members. “When risks and/or noncompliance with House policies have been identified,” he said, “corrective actions by House officers is greatly delayed by the required coordination with shared employees’ multiple employing authorities.”

  The answer was simple: hire companies to do the work, or better yet, have employees who reported to Central IT, rather than members, run the computer systems, Kiko said.

  But the committee took the rare step of rejecting the proposal. And they did it in secret, with Committee Vice Chair Rodney Davis holding “listening sessions” in which members railed against fixing obvious cybersecurity holes by citing their need for autonomy. Republicans tend to use private contractors rather than shared employees, so it was no mystery where the objections came from: Democrats, the party who had for two years held up an abhorrence of cyber meddling as the cornerstone of their rhetoric. But the Illinois Republican Davis, who ranks near the top of Congress on a scorecard measuring bipartisanship, shielded their identities and took the hit for them. “Members expressed a strong desire to keep shared employees on as House employees instead of contract employees,” he said.

  Irving spoke up, saying those congressmen were putting their own selfish political desires over the security of the United States. “Ultimately it is the balance between the member interest and the governmental interest.”

  This time, it didn’t even take a threatening finger jabbed in the chest to back Kiko down. Maybe “you could have it both ways” and the group of experts could dial back their proposal, he conceded. Even though he had just said it was “impossible” to close the loopholes while preserving the job category, and that his office would need the authority to override members who refused to fire
people who made a mockery of the House’s cybersecurity rules, perhaps all of these things could be discarded while still billing it as a reform. “Members would be able to hire who they wanted, but as part of those employees’ performance standards, maybe there could be something in there that said they had to comply with House policies, and then if they wouldn’t, we could deny access or tell the member about it, or elevate it the committee,” he offered lamely.

  There you had it: nothing had been done to the Awans, so there was no deterrent to future bad actors. The major loopholes hadn’t been closed. But maybe next time, if investigators detected someone hacking Congress, they could “tell the member about it” just as they had more than a year ago.

  It sounded good and meant nothing, and Chairman Harper could take credit for it. It was perfect. He struck a tough pose, as if he had sided with the security experts instead of completely overriding them. “At the end of the day, you have to make sure you protect the House of Representatives, even if that upsets someone,” the chairman said.

  A few weeks later, Chairman Harper took his version of swift action: directing Kiko to write policies requiring certain things within the next six months. Largely, these were identical to what was already House policy: that shared employees file financial disclosures (the recommendations say nothing about whether they have to be accurate), and sign a piece of paper saying they won’t break rules, just like the committee ordered in 2002 in a requirement that was entirely ignored.

  There were pats on the back all around.

  When Chairman Harper announced his retirement, Representative Brady commended him. “He has sought bipartisanship where it has been possible; he has managed the House in a truly professional manner. His polite, but results focused, approach has made this institution a better place.”

  INDEX OF AFFECTED CONGRESS MEMBERS