It’s a story reminiscent of a spy novel. But the scandal surrounding Imran Awan has plenty of elements of the surreal and the farcical, too.
Awan was a congressional IT staffer. Numerous members of his family joined him on the congressional payroll. Now he is awaiting trial for bank fraud. What started in 2016 as an investigation into equipment and data theft has evolved into a case about falsely obtaining home equity loans and sending money to Pakistan.
As the probe evolves, there have been dozens of shocking reports about the family’s activities and access. The plot twists have spawned numerous conspiracy theories. Awan’s lawyer Christopher Gowen says that all these reports are complicating the trial. “Every time we think it’s done, Johnny-on-the-spot over there at the Daily Caller writes something and we have to start back into this investigation,” he says of Luke Rosiak, the investigative reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation who has done the most work on the case. “Every single thing that has been alleged, hypothetically, by the Daily Caller has been investigated thoroughly.”
Imran Awan, born in Pakistan in 1980 but a naturalized U.S. citizen, started working on the Hill in 2004. His brother, Abid, soon joined him. Awan’s wife, Hina Alvi, came on board in 2007, and his younger brother, Jamal, began in 2014. Abid’s friend Rao Abbas was also added to the congressional payroll in 2012. The five were “shared” employees and worked for dozens of House Democrats. Over the course of several years, the group earned millions of dollars.
Abid ran a car dealership (named Cars International A, or CIA) on the side. “It’s not clear where the dealership’s money was going,” wrote Rosiak, “because it was sued by at least five different people on all ends of a typical car business who said they were stiffed. CIA didn’t pay the security deposit, rent or taxes for its building, it didn’t pay wholesalers who provided cars.” In 2012, Abid filed for bankruptcy.
In 2016, the Awans caught the eye of congressional investigators. The initial allegations, contained in presentations by the House inspector general, did not look good. Rosiak, who obtained a PowerPoint summary of the presentations, reported that the Awans “made unauthorized access to congressional servers in 2016, allegedly accessing the data of members for whom they did not work, logging in as members of Congress themselves, and covering their tracks.” “Excessive logons are an indication that the server is being used for nefarious purposes,” the IG presentation said, “and elevated the risk that individuals could be reading and/or removing information.” Investigators also discovered that the Awan group had logged on to one Democratic Caucus server 5,735 times over the course of seven months. The networks that the Awans were accessing don’t hold classified information, but they do hold lawmakers’ password-protected email, according to the Washington Post.
The House’s chief administrative officer told lawmakers this April that the IG had also uncovered “evidence of procurement fraud.” The Awans had manipulated invoices for expensive equipment into incremental payments of less than $500. This allowed the purchases to be “left off the official House inventory,” according to the Post, which also reported that this equipment was sometimes delivered to the Awans’ homes.
The matter was passed on to Capitol Police and the FBI in October 2016 and is ongoing. Gowen rejects the basis for the investigation, which he says is politically motivated and grew out of the IG report on shared employees. “The right-wing media and a few members of Congress blew this up and got the FBI’s attention, got the U.S. attorney’s attention,” he says. “They started this giant investigation that’s probably the most thorough, exhaustive investigation in the history of this country probably. Or close to it.” The available clips of the IG report, he added, have been “taken out of context.” “There’s multiple logins because they shared a workstation,” he notes. “They worked for separate offices so you have to log in to one office, then when you switch to do a different assignment for the other office, you log in to that office.”
The five workers were banned from the House network in February 2017. Most congressional offices quickly fired them, though one kept Imran Awan on despite the mounting allegations: the office of Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who had been chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2011 to 2016. Awan’s potential access to Wasserman Schultz’s emails, combined with allegations of data theft, have spawned conspiracy theories about whether the family was responsible for the infamous 2016 leak of DNC emails.
Wasserman Schultz drew criticism for refusing to fire Awan. “He didn’t have access to the network, but he was able to give us guidance and advice and troubleshoot on a wide variety of other technological issues,” she told the Sun-Sentinel and suggested that Awan was being targeted because he is Muslim.
Gowen thinks that Republicans in Congress concocted the Awan scandal to target Wasserman Schultz. “They worked for a female Democrat who is one of the targets of the Republican party,” he said. “And so they said, ‘Whoa, we got Pakistan, we got female, we got Democrat. Let’s roll.’ ”
In the months between the Awans being barred from the House network and Imran Awan’s arrest in July 2017, Capitol Police found an “unattended bag” in a small room on Capitol Hill. The bag contained a laptop with the username “RepDWS,” copies of Awan’s driver license and congressional ID, a Pakistani ID card, “composition notebooks with notes handwritten saying ‘attorney client privilege,’ ” and letters addressed to prosecutors, according to a police report obtained by Luke Rosiak and the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Wasserman Schultz sought to stop law enforcement from accessing the contents of the laptop and at a May 2017 hearing went after the Capitol Police chief about the protocol for handling a member of congress’s equipment when the member is not under investigation. The chief suggested that an ongoing criminal investigation changes the traditional protocol. “I think you’re violating the rules when you conduct your business that way and you should expect that there will be consequences,” Wasserman Schultz said.
Months later she said that Awan had “accidentally left” the laptop, which belonged to her office, somewhere, and that the loss had been reported. “This was not my laptop. I have never seen that laptop. I don’t know what’s on the laptop,” she said.
Wasserman Schultz finally fired Awan after he was charged with bank fraud. According to the affidavit, Imran and his wife Alvi listed a rental property as a primary residence when applying for a $165,000 home equity line of credit in December 2016. That money was then wired to Pakistan in January 2017 as part of a $283,000 transfer. The Awans had also applied for a second line of credit for $120,000. Prosecutors said in court documents that “based on the suspicious timing of that transaction,” the pair “likely knew they were under investigation at that time.”
When a Congressional Federal Credit Union wire-transfer specialist called Alvi about the request, Awan answered and pretended to be her, according to court documents. Asked about the reason for the wire, Awan said “funeral arrangements.” The specialist questioned whether that was a “sufficient reason for such a large transfer.” Awan then changed his reason to “purchasing property.”
Awan was arrested in July 2017 at Dulles airport on his way to Pakistan, a scene that inspired reports of his fleeing the country. Wasserman Schultz rejects the notion that Awan was fleeing. She told the Sun-Sentinel, “When you’re trying to flee, you don’t fill out a form with your employer and go on unpaid leave.” Awan’s lawyer says that he was traveling on a “round-trip ticket with an extended return date.” Prosecutors said in court documents that they believe Awan “deleted the contents of his phones hours before his arrest.” He had $9,000 on him.
Months earlier, Alvi had also been stopped at Dulles by the FBI, also on her way to Pakistan. She had “abruptly” taken her three children out of school, according to an affidavit, and was traveling with “numerous pieces of luggage,” including cardboard boxes containing household goods and food items. Customs agents searched her bags and found $12,400 in cash. Alvi, who booked a return flight for September, was permitted to board her flight. The Awans’ lawyers said in court documents that Alvi and the children went to Pakistan so that they could “rent out their home to be able to satisfy mortgage obligations” and to “temporarily escape the media frenzy.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation has published scores of other reports alleging wrongdoing by the Awans. A recent one said that Awan was married to two women, one of whom told Virginia police that he “kept her ‘like a slave.’ ” Weeks after her statement to police, gunmen in Pakistan “shot into her family home,” Luke Rosiak further wrote. Hina Alvi has also alleged polygamy and fraud by her husband.
After news of the criminal probe broke, Imran put his house up for rent and a Marine Corps veteran moved in. The tenant told Rosiak that he found “wireless routers, hard drives that look like they tried to destroy, laptops, [and] a lot of brand new expensive toner” in the house. He called investigators, who reportedly seized the equipment. Awan then threatened “to sue the renter for stealing” the hard drives.
“That man is a criminal,” Gowen says of the Marine, who he says also failed to pay his rent. “He’s the one that has reported that there are these damaged hard drives. When they finally got to looking at all of what they found, it was one damaged, old BMW radio.”
President Trump has tweeted about the case a number of times. This month he wrote, “Our Justice Department must not let Awan & Debbie Wasserman Schultz off the hook. The Democrat I.T. scandal is a key to much of the corruption we see today. They want to make a ‘plea deal’ to hide what is on their Server. Where is Server? Really bad!”
Gowen thinks that the tweets are giving the defense ammunition. “We thought there’s nothing we can do about this bank-fraud issue, until President Twitter got on the Twitter last week and just blatantly lied on behalf of the Justice Department,” he says. “Now we may have something to work with here because of that idiot.” He told CNN that the latest tweet violated his client’s due-process rights.
It’s just the latest twist in Capitol Hill’s most mysterious bank fraud case.
