Newt’s World Podcast

Episode 2: The Con Man of Congress

Description: The sweeping portrait of a cover-up, manipulation, and the subversion of justice in the US Congress. The story focuses on Imran Awan, a Pakistani-American information technology worker.

Air date: February 15, 2019

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Newt Gingrich: on the second episode of Newt’s World.

Luke Rosiak: I think this is probably the biggest congressional scandal going back 30, 40, 50 years. We don’t know how bad this scandal really was and may still be.

Sowers: A member of Congress has the ability to hire anyone they want to be on their staff. If a member of Congress says, I trust this person, I know this person, they can opt out of doing a background check.

Louie Gohmert: He must’ve thought if this scandal came out involving 40 or more Democrat, uh, members of Congress, that might mean we would lose the majority.

Newt Gingrich: This is a story about a computer hack on the House of Representatives. It involves an it guy who was born in Pakistan named Imran Awan

Newt Gingrich: We’re digging into the case of Imran Awan information technology specialist and shared employee in the U.S. House of Representatives. The story begins in 2004 when Awan becomes employed by members of Congress to serve as their information technology needs for their offices. Over time. He builds a rapport and gains more clients based on word of mouth recommendations. At one point, he’s working for 40 members of Congress as a shared staff information technology employee and billing over $100,000 a year to multiple offices for his services. He even hires his family members who have little to no it experience to work with him. Then on February 3rd, 2017 the chief administrative officer of the House Representatives together with the sergeant at arms issue a memo with the subject quote, revoking it and physical access for identified shared employees. Close quote with the time frame of urgent the memo list, the following five employees, Rao Abbas, Hina Alvi, Jamal Awan, Abid “Omar” Awan.

Newt Gingrich: Upon receipt of this urgent memo, most members of Congress took steps to release Imran Juan and his family members from their positions affective immediately. Something in their actions had caused house leadership to become concerned. What little was known about what had happened at the time. The story you’re going to hear today is that, uh, one of the biggest coverups in Congress in many years. It is the story of a young man who through his relationship with members of the house, takes advantage of his access to congressional servers. Some have accused the Awan of causing a hack from within the house. Others say nothing happened. Which side will you believe? I’m joined today by my guest, Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter from the Daily Caller whose new book Obstruction of Justice is available at bookstores now, Patrick Sowers a former it specialist who worked in the US House Representatives at the same time as him, Imran Awan and Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas, who was one of the early voices in Congress to follow the evidence and ask tough questions about what had really happened. First, joining me is Luke Rosiak. Luke, you’ve been doggedly investigating and reporting on this story for two years. Tell us what you’ve uncovered.

Luke Rosiak: This is a story about a computer hack on the House of Representatives. It involves an it guy named Imran Awan. Ronald Juan is the guy who comes over from Pakistan, uh, at the age of 17 under the versity lottery. And of course his whole family follows under chain migration. And as I learned what happened, and I was really one of the only reporters who noticed this little press release, uh, that occurred during the inauguration of Trump. And I followed the trail back to a hack during the 2016 election that none of us really heard about. And it really exposed the ongoing tremendous vulnerability of Congress to cyber threats and blackmail that, uh, could very well be going onto this day.

Newt Gingrich: How does he make a transition to being the it guy in the u s house?

Luke Rosiak: He puts himself through Community College of Northern Virginia and then through Johns Hopkins. And while he’s finishing up at Johns Hopkins University with a degree in it, he starts working as a contractor for a company in the House of Representatives.

Luke Rosiak: But Congressman Robert Wechsler of Florida, hires him and Imran Awan winds up cutting out the middleman and starting working for this congressman directly. No, no contract and relationship. And after that the members of Congress in particular, Robert Wexler, really protective of this guy, they really took him Imran Awan under their wing. And so these early Congressman Robert Wexler of Florida, Javier Bissera of California, now attorney general, um, you know, Gregory Meeks in New York, what they would do is uh, Imran Awan cobbled together a salary working for several members on a part time basis. Um, and eventually he started earning as much as a congressman. These employers, they would encourage new congressman, newly elected freshmen to put this guy on their payroll. And, and when he couldn’t make any more money on the house under the house rules, they started attributing the paychecks to his relatives. So you saw his brother and his younger brother who is only 20 old.

Newt Gingrich: Well, I mean under the, under the rules of the house, you can have shared employees and it happens all the time and a member can decide with two or three other members to achieve something. Let’s say for example, to do research or to represent a particular issue or in this case to had information technology assistance. Oh, part of what makes the, the Awan case amazing is ultimately I think there were 40 members who we’re involved in this and now that that’s a number that is, I’ve never seen before in this kind of a shared relationship. When you get to that level, it’s pretty clear that substantial number of them have no idea what he’s doing, that that is not, it’s not a big enough part of their operation and just they sort of forget about it. So He’s, they’re drawing them money, supposedly doing the job and presumably he did do the job. The question was what else he was doing with the level of access he had, to 40 different members.

Luke Rosiak: A given congressional office really isn’t that big, right? I mean, you’re talking about like 15 staff with a budget of around a million dollars a year and you don’t really need a full time it guy to administer a staff of 15. And so they share,

Newt Gingrich: I mean from their standpoint, they, they’re not only got the lottery in terms of being able to immigrate to United States, they then hit the lottery in terms of being able to exploit the u s governor.

Luke Rosiak: The problem is they were putting a, by all appearances, no show staff on the payroll to circumvent the rules. And so there were disclosures that were telling members that this guy was making as much as the chief of staff or as much as congressmen themselves. And then they could also really see that all of his relatives were on the payroll. And so what starts to emerge is, you know, a ghost employee scheme is what they call it. Um, but there were also more than enough red flags and disclosures that were made to congressmen and just lot of people knew that what was going on here was totally happening. One in the end of the day. This one family took $7 million supposedly for administering servers, but most of them didn’t even have any background in computers.

Newt Gingrich: All right. I think what will surprise people a is in your reporting and gradually discovered that there’s an entire family network. Can you describe how ultimately engaged as entire family to live off the US tax payer?

Luke Rosiak: Basically Imran was the one with it skills and he was the one doing most of the work. Um, but he made it so that members of Congress put his relatives on the payroll even though they never saw those people. So you have his brother, a bead, uh, you who you know, just had a high school degree. You have his other brother who is only 20 years old, making $165,000 a year. I mean, that’s the only 20 year old in Congress who’s making 165 k a year. Usually the one of them actually a McDonald’s employee. Now Roberts works at McDonald’s. He’s got nothing to do with technology. That’s against the rules on the part of the member. The members of Congress individually hired each of these, each of these people and almost none of them had any background in it, and so it’s a ghost employee scandal, a $7 million one,.

Newt Gingrich: and so part of what people need to realize is that members of Congress in theory are legally responsible or having signed a document which is actually a federal felony. It’s false that says, I have hired this person who’s done this job. Therefore they’re getting this money as a method of protectors. So theoretically you start with a level of defense of the individual congressman, none of whom were sanctioned in any way after $7 million.

Luke Rosiak: What we had was when they were buying computer equipment, they would change the prices so that everything costs or was reported as costing $499 which was just underneath the threshold. In theory, one of the protections of the system is if you buy something above $500 it shows up. Initially it gets reviewed.

Newt Gingrich: You know what It is, it has, it has some kind of identity number. Where they were doing was deliberately gaming the system. They coming in just below the level of which should be noticed. But, but didn’t they in one case come in like for 800 items?

Luke Rosiak: Yeah, it was like hundreds of items and hundreds of thousands of dollars. So by changing the invoices and falsifying vouchers, falsifying federal documents, they made it so that everything showed up as being less than 500 bucks and therefore it didn’t have a barcode and it wasn’t tracked.

Newt Gingrich: Didn’t you report the one office actually just in one office at $15,000 in equipment missing

Luke Rosiak: Yvette Clark, Congresswoman from Brooklyn, she had a 10th of her annual budget go missing. That’s $120,000 and these offices have a budget of around 1.2 million year, $120,000 went missing worth of technology equipment. And this is like big screen TVs, like 68 inch big screen TVs that have just walked off. The idea that $120,000 walked off is completely insane. And so we’re following the clues from the $7 million financial scheme to this systematic falsification and . And then we get to the hack. And so this came to light from several strong women who were by and large Democrats and who had the courage to kind of stand up and tell the truth when no one else did. Wendy Anderson, who worked for you that Clark the congressman from Brooklyn and she was the deputy chief of staff. She concluded that the chief of staff was conspiring with a Abid Awan, the it guy’s brother to steal all this equipment and she said, so, and what happened then? Yvette Clark tried to make the problem go away. Um, she actually, you know, the chief of staff, a guy named Shelley Davis who was implicated by his own deputy as being a thief. And next thing you know, he’s out on the street. He’s not working there anymore, but she doesn’t really say anything public about it.

Newt Gingrich: I’m as disappointed in the Republican leadership of the House as the Democrat because this wasn’t being obvious. Things are, it’s like having a large buffalo run through your office and ignoring it. I mean the number of things going on here that any reasonable, serious attention to the public trust and the public good would have to decisive investigations.

Luke Rosiak: Absolutely. And when this, uh, deputy chief of staff, this courageous whistleblower working for a democratic congresswoman, Yvette Clark, when she comes forward and when they uncover all these invoices that are systematically falsified, the inspector general of the House of Representatives gets involved. This happens to be someone with a tremendous cybersecurity background. And she says, all right, well we definitely got these guys on fraud because the invoices are falsified and there’s been a lot of talk later, oh, the FBI is involved. We’re investigating for two years. Think about this. You’ve got this financial document you’re submitting in the house and it says that it’s $2,000 computer costs $499 that’s fraud. So she says, you know, we got fraud, but these guys are it guys. Obviously the much more frightening thing here is the capacity, the potential that they abused there, the access that they add. Now as systems administrators, they could read and even modify any file that the members of Congress they worked for or their staffs had anywhere on their servers or hard drives, any email they can even send emails as a member of Congress. So there was just a tremendous potential for harm here.

Newt Gingrich: Ghost employees are nothing new in the house and it’s happened off and on probably the whole history of the house, but it is illegal and uh, creativity of this group and the sheer number of ghost employees and then ghost employee essentially as a person who is being paid but isn’t showing up. And so in effect, a, there’s no real person there, which is why they’re called a ghost. But in this case, you have a very sophisticated effort to maximize the money by, by having an entire family network engaged. Can you just explore for a minute how they were setting this up?

Luke Rosiak: They would typically get the members of Congress to put Imran are one on their payroll for like 500 bucks or something really, really small. And that was enough to create a login for him. So he could do all the work, but then he would get the member of Congress to put someone else on and they basically got complete control of the house’s HR system. I mean Imran Awan can strut into that office at any time and it’ll be in the congressman’s office for an hour. How does an it guy get to be so important? He somehow had the ability to convince members of Congress to put all these people on their payroll. And so they admitted later like you know Congressman Emmanuel Cleaver admitted on audio. Yeah. I don’t know this guy that works at McDonald’s, Imran. Oh on does all the work. And so that’s against the house rules cause Imran Awan wasn’t on his payroll.

Luke Rosiak: And so it’s especially funny because you know, kind of big picture here, you hacking is a huge deal. It needs to be taken seriously. But the problem is at the same time they had this extremely, extremely cavalier at best, you know, approach to cybersecurity in house. And this went on for a decade where they’re given all full access to the computers, to people with no training in cybersecurity. The policies existed. You know that you give an a, a background check to it guys and every one of these members of Congress who hired him, Imran Awan and his family, they exempted them.

Newt Gingrich: Correct me if I’m wrong. What we know is he gets people to hire his family. People pay no attention to them because they trust them and then branch out from just stealing money on ghost employees, stealing money on technology and then they may or may not have gone into hacking. The Democrats don’t want to expose it because they have 40 members involved. The Republicans for some reason are comatose. It’s almost like a Russian novel and then you have this thin thread of honest people among whom are the inspector general surrounded by people who are methodically avoiding discovering the truth and then using their institutional authority to say, since we can’t discover the truth, there mustn’t be any truth because we’re the FBI and you should trust us. What I want to move to is you’ve got these guys who’ve been hired as ghost and boys and now learn how to steal technology money. And ironically, as the Democratic National Committee is being hacked, the chair of the Democratic National Committee is probably the strongest defender of Imran in the house. And would you talk about her relationship and how that, that this also, this by itself would be a novel.

Luke Rosiak: So this started way back in 2004 and Iran won, made inroads through the Florida delegation, uh, Robert Wexler, who’s no longer in office. And then he very quickly jumped over to then newly elected congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And from then on she was kind of one of his biggest defenders, probably the biggest advocate. Wasserman Schultz really, really takes this guy under, under her wing and forcefully encourages newly elected freshmen as she ascends into the ranks and becomes eventual chairman of the DNC. When you’re a freshman and you’re kind of a backbench guy who’s new to Washington, she says, look, just put this guy on your payroll. Just do it. And they do. And so that’s one of the ways that he helps get the $7 million.

Newt Gingrich: You have Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida congresswoman, head of the Democratic National Committee. And then we’re going to ask him what he’s about to be hacked. She trusts totally, totally, and Imran, no one in his family and is protecting them. And then she gets involved in this thing.

Luke Rosiak: Right. And so the stuff about the theft started coming up in late 2015 really early 2016 by March of April, 2016 they had an inspector in general investigation going on into the theft. And they very quickly found that these guys, the whole family was logging into members emails accounts, using members of Congress’s personal email addresses and credentials and passwords. But they were even logging in to members of Congress that they didn’t work for. And so they were logging in a to members who had previously fired them. And obviously I thought of retaliation. Are they mad? They got fired? Why are they, why would you log in to someone who fired you? Why would you log in later? A lot of very, very suspicious behavior like that. And they were doing high tech stuff that made it hard to track, very deliberately taking steps to conceal what they were doing on the house servers. And now the biggest epicenter of the hack as the ig identified was the group called the House of Democratic Caucus. You,.

Newt Gingrich: it’s your organizational [inaudible] the body of the Democrats in the house so that theoretically all the Democrats belong to it,

Luke Rosiak: but they have their own office with their own infrastructure. And in this case, the chairman of it was Javier Bissera, so it’s got its own server. And um, that was, they logged into that server like 6,000 times within a few months, way more than you would ever normally do. And they were funneling data off the house network too. So the ig down.

Newt Gingrich: , do we know where the files went to?

Luke Rosiak: So one of the things they were doing is they had Dropbox and so that was uploading it to the cloud. And at that point the files were, it was an artificial Dropbox account that was controlled by Iran. One, it wasn’t something the house could shut down because the house doesn’t let you use Dropbox. So that was one way that they saw these files going off. So Debbie Wasserman Schultz, which most people know as the chairman of the DNC when it was hacked, Imran Awan was working as her it guy in Congress since way back when, she was just like a backbench member.

Luke Rosiak: And he kind of rose up along with her. And by the time that she was chairman of the DNC in 2016 he wasn’t working for the DNC. But if you search his name on wikileaks, you can see that he was at, you know, talking with the DNC. Uh, he basically had the password to Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s iPad, and the DNC would call him up if they needed access. He had more access to Wasserman Schultz, his stuff than anyone else, but he worked for the house. And so we’re talking about really two separate things here. There’s the DNC hack, and then there’s this other hack in the house. They were detected at virtually the exact same time. So it’s in June of 2016 when wikileaks hacks, uh, releases the first emails from the DNC three days later, the inspector general for the House of Representatives goes to the leadership, Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi and says, I’ve, I’ve uncovered a hack in the House of Representatives.

Luke Rosiak: Uh, it’s a really, really serious, has all the markings of nefarious acting actions. And the one doing it was the ITA for Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Newt Gingrich: The. Inspector General has told the Republican Speaker of the House and the Democratic Leader of the House what happens,.

Luke Rosiak: Democrats tried to act like they had never really heard of any of this and they didn’t really know what any of it was. That’s not what the case was. I mean, Nancy Pelosi’s general counsel guy named Bernie Ramo, screamed at the IG and said, you’re not the policeman of the world. You’re not going to investigate this stuff. You’re not so much as to talk to any of these guys. You can’t talk to any of the members. You can’t look at their emails and you can’t look at the data that was flying off the network. And he was really, really worked up about it, but they actively retaliated against, screamed at and blocked the inspector general who was originally appointed Nancy Pelosi. And then later on Paul Ryan, Champlain Lauren, because she was so good at her job. And eventually what this culminated in is an operative for Nancy Pelosi, um, falsely accused the IG of ethics violations and drove her out of the house.

Newt Gingrich: The Inspector General actually is an expert in cyber activities and the Capitol police had no one who was an expert. And so the leadership of the house for some bizarre reason, which we don’t understand today, moves the authority of the investigation away from the woman who had done the work to the Capitol police who couldn’t possibly do the work.

Luke Rosiak: Right. So the inspector general and her whole team who’s, you know, their mission is to do exactly this kind of thing. She is the chairman of the international cybersecurity experts association, uh, like you can’t get any better cyber security investigator credentials than this woman had. And so for no reason, after she’s trying to do her investigation, after Nancy policies, people screaming her and block her the, you know, I basically frame her on ethics charges. They take the investigation away from her and they give it to the Capitol police. And so that’s kind of the slight of hand here is that law enforcement should have meant the ig working with the prosecutors like they’ve done in so many previous cases are you can have the FBI involved. What instead the Capitol Police is controlled by House leadership and its mission is to protect congress.

Newt Gingrich: And let me point out that somebody who helped develop the inspector general role, uh, they are a branch of investigation. I mean with the inspector general’s job in every single federal agency is to have the authority to dig out things which seem to be potentially criminal and then to turn them over to the Justice Department for Prosecution. If they find enough evidence, I expect the Democrats to defend themselves. But the degree to which the Republicans were apparently totally asleep or willfully asleep or had Amnesia or something, is amazing to me. And this is a good example. What we’re talking about is whether or not secrets are being hacked in a way which is a threat to national security or for that matter just theft.

Luke Rosiak: They say, well, we’re not gonna look at the data. We know that data and the presentation actually says it has sensitive file names. They let her look at the file names, but not see what’s in the file. And so an example of a file that was being taken off the network illegally, or in violation of policy at least was credentials. And it’s not credible that anyone would’ve had that reaction.

Newt Gingrich: I believe that there is a remarkable story that’s mostly covered up

Luke Rosiak: when he’s banned from Congress and he’s still sneaking around though with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, his laptop, he’s still got a back door into the house computer network. Meanwhile, everyone on Capitol Hill knew that the things that were going on were completely abnormal. So when these guys are banned from the network, they bring in the house, provides free it guys to all the affected members. And Debbie Wasserman Schultz refuses to accept this free service. Even though it cost her money, she won’t let an outsider come look at what’s on our network. And Iran is still on her payroll, even though it’s banned. You know, they’re just tasked with fixing it, getting things back into compliance with the house rules. And that’s that no documentation. And so they never had anyone come in and do an audit.

Newt Gingrich: So ultimately the whole thing breaks down. And Imran is indicted for bank fraud. And how does that then that only goes to,

Luke Rosiak: yeah, they knew about this since July of 2016 a year later in July of 2017 he tries to go to Pakistan with 9,000 bucks in his suitcase and a, he’s arrested by the, by the FBI Dallas airport. Um, so at that point I said, all right, I’ve been selling everyone this for six months. He’s going to be charged with hacking congress and running a procurement scam. Uh, he wasn’t charged with that. He was charged with wiring $300,000 to Pakistan, which actually went to a Pakistani police officer. Um, and so what happened is he went into the Congressional Federal Credit Union and told him that he had, his dad died and he had a $300,000 funeral and he needed to wire money over to Pakistan. And to do that, they committed mortgage fraud. And so they got him for this small little thing. And even then I said, all right, so how they got al Capone or whatever, you know, they often use pretextual charges to hold you for a minute while they continue to do the other investigation.

Luke Rosiak: So they charged them with this little mortgage fraud thing. Another year goes by, they keep delaying the court hearings. It’s all very secretive. Nothing occurs in open court. They’re trying to resolve this case. The serious charges, the ones, all the stuff we’ve been talking about behind the scenes, uh, with the plea deal. And the DOJ never charges Imran Awan one with any of this stuff, despite all the evidence we’ve talked about. And, but yet they give him everything they have now under the legal process. If you’re charged with something, the prosecutors have to give you evidence. You need to defend yourself. But he was never charged with this stuff, and yet they gave him everything even though discovery didn’t apply. And so, you know, a year goes by, there’s all these things that are amply documented in ways that are really in controvertible and he’s never charged. And it becomes clear that they don’t want to take this case to trial. They never really interview anyone.

Newt Gingrich: His lawyer negotiates a deal. The deal doesn’t just eliminate everything that mattered except one case of false representation on home equity. But the deal goes on to say in paragraph eight the government quote, the government has uncovered no evidence that your client violated federal law with respect to the house computer system. Now this is clearly a negotiated deal between the defense attorney and the Justice Department, despite all of the evidence that we’ve seen. And he’s then sentenced to time served and three months of supervised probation. This is a case study in corruption. So you’ve given us a story that runs over 10 years, involves millions of dollars, 40 members of Congress, the Democratic National Committee Chair, and it ultimately comes down to one count of a home equity line, credit application, falsification, and a three months supervised probation. This is a case study in corruption and a case study and the kind of scandal that frankly every citizen ought to be very bothered by because if the congress can be penetrated by people at the level of information technology that we’re seeing here, combined with the level of financial corruption is to duality, then I think that there’s a genuine threat to the entire system.

Newt Gingrich: when we come back, I’ll be joined by Patrick Sowers, a former it specialist in the u s house of Representatives. He’ll give us an insider’s perspective on the job Imran Awan held

Newt Gingrich: My next guest is Patrick Snorers. If you don’t mind, Patrick, please introduce yourself and what your role was in the house.

Patrick Sowers: Hello, my name is Patrick Sowers. Uh, I worked on the hill as an it specialist for 14 years. Couple of different capacities. I was there as a contractor. I was there as a staff member. I started on the hill and 2004, uh, after a few months I became a shared staffer. Worked for, uh, probably 25 different members in my tenure. There Imran Awan, was also a shared, uh, employee. He worked mostly on the Democrat side, uh, and saw him at meetings and uh, whenever the house required us to get together for education.

Newt Gingrich: So describe for me a bit more about how shared staffing works.

Patrick Sowers: The shared staffing programs, actually an excellent idea. What it does is it gives members of Congress and access to a professional it person at a fraction of the cost. Generally offices would have to have assistance administered in the office and it was, hey, who wants the job? And instead of doing that, they actually get an it professional that It professional because you worked from multiple offices, is able to make a good income a living while serving different offices. So it’s kind of a win-win situation for both sides.

Newt Gingrich: Please explain for our listeners how individual congressman can hire you

Patrick Sowers: in order to defer cost. A member of Congress is a program. There’s generally only two types of shared employees. Uh, your finance person who handles your accounting for your office and your systems administration. There’s also some times where, uh, legislative staff will work across a committee or several different offices to share the share the burden of that expense to the member.

Newt Gingrich: And there’s no one on the hill. The dictates which one of these options a member of Congress decides on

Patrick Sowers: the House. It department HIR, um, sets up the rules, regulations and requirements, but a member of Congress is free to hire anyone he wants to be on his staff.

Newt Gingrich: Explain to me what the HIR, our role is in Congress. What are they task with?

Patrick Sowers: Uh, H I r is the house it department. They manage the infrastructure for Capitol Hill. So the email systems, the, the currently do all of the data backup and those functionalities for the office where if we go back 15 years ago, offices had servers in their, each individual office and then they had to have someone to maintain that in order to save cause the house it department brought that together into a one storage system and it’s divided out in secured for each individual office they provide, they provide a high level, um, support for offices. They have, uh, TSR, technical support representatives that they provide to each member of Congress, but they can’t get in and do the day to day work in the office. It’s their, they staffing would be, have to be too high. You need that personal attention. And that’s why the shared employee program is actually a good thing because it’s a trusted member.

Patrick Sowers: Someone the member puts their trust and uh, sometimes it’s a good person and if we’d started to learn, sometimes it’s not always a good person. Um, but that gives the member the ability to hire someone that they have authority over. Um, if they relied strictly on HIR, the house it department to provide them services, there’s no one advocating for what the member needs to the house. So you’re told what programs you have access to. You’re told that what systems are broken and if you don’t have an it person who has their vested interest in you instead of the overall hill, it doesn’t provide you the protection that you need.

Newt Gingrich: So give us an example. How would a newly sworn in congressman or congresswoman who doesn’t know systems are going to need, how would you come in and interact with them?

Patrick Sowers: Generally, a shared systems, uh, administrator gets introduced to new members by the members that are currently working for, if you’re on their team and they trust you, they know that they can recommend you to the freshmen from their state or their delegation to, to get a good service, someone they can trust. Now, I was, you know, I did the job for almost 14 years on the hill, so I knew the ins and outs of all the software, all of the services that you needed. Uh, you know, even what cell phones worked best and what parts of the city and what parts of the country became my responsibilities to shared systems person. So you’d make recommendations on software, on decisions, on it policies and used for staff in the office. You know what they can and can’t do. The House has rules, but then the member wants to go above and beyond that. One of the, you know, the biggest things we advise them on is their email communication. A members email is protected by congressional privilege as long as they use their official email. Well, if you’re communicating on a Gmail system or another public system, now those are affordable documents that could actually be called in for her testimony.

Newt Gingrich: But the congressional emails are protected.

Patrick Sowers: Congressional email is protected under the congressional privilege.

Newt Gingrich: It seems like they have several securities in place

Patrick Sowers: in the, in which we live today, where every single thing we, even my microwave at home is connected to the Internet. So in an environment like that, HIR has a mountain to climb and they do a good job climbing that in most cases. You as I, in the 14 years I was there, I don’t think I disagreed with them on very many things that they did in a security standpoint. Uh, they do a good job of addressing that. Um, but there’s, you know, there’s holes in every system and it’s their job to identify those as quickly as possible. So the other interesting aspect of this story that’s perplexing is the whole combining of invoices. The fact that Imran Awan ordered approximately $28,000 worth of equipment and put them all in at $499 so they wouldn’t be tracked. Can you explain the whole process of equipment ordering, the financial threshold, and the tracking?

Patrick Sowers: The House has a purchasing department and a member office submits their purchase orders to that department and they’re followed. Um, last I checked the, the cap was $499 that it didn’t have to be listed on your inventory so you could order, you know, an iPad, a camera, um, cell phones usually fell into that category. A monitor that’s, you know, back in the day they used to track every single monitor. We’ll monitor almost disposable. Now you can get a, an very nice monitor for $100. So it’s now, you know, items like that that it is just not worth the time and effort to track those small items are supposed to fall into that 499 threshold. Anything above that has to go through, have a house asset tag put on it and is inventoried and the member is actually responsible for that equipment until it’s disposed of.

Newt Gingrich: In your 14 years of experience, were you ever asked to make sure purchase orders for items like iPads or phones came in at or below $499, but as a member of Congress or their staff requested it?

Patrick Sowers: Not once. Literally not once. It was easier for us as administrators to buy small items when they were less than. So if an item was, you know, $502, we went back to the vendor and said, hey, can, can we get it for 499 because it just made our jobs easier. We could actually order it without going through the procurement process. Um, but items that were, you know, computers, value, copiers, things like that. No, they had to go through the procurement process and there was never a fudging of numbers to me to make that work.

Newt Gingrich: And how time consuming is the procurement process?

Patrick Sowers: It’s, it’s a little time consuming. As we all know, government has red tape and there are folks there that have a job to do. Um, you know, you have to go out and get a quote for the item, which is always a best practice. We generally get, uh, two or three quotes until you get some vendors that you can trust and then you have to take that, provide a purchase order, submit that purchase order, um, comes back and then you have to go through asset tagging things after that. So it’s, it’s not a cumbersome process, but it is a little time consuming and you know, if you have an immediate need, um, having that threshold is, is great. If something breaks, a monitor breaks and you have a user who just can’t use their computer without a monitor, it’s great to be able to have a local vendor and get that item quick and replace it.

Newt Gingrich: One of the interesting facets of the Imran Awan story is the pulling together of items for a massive procurement of $28,000. Explain to me how in your experience an order that large didn’t have to go through the procurement process.

Patrick Sowers: You could buy several items under the four 99 category, but if one single item went over 499, then it had to go to the procurement process.

Newt Gingrich: So as a member of Congress, I could buy 50 iPods at $499

Patrick Sowers: you could buy 50 iPads at four 99 but that would have to be signed off by the chief of staff. You can’t just place that order. The chief of staff for each integral office has to approve. There has to be a member signature on every purchase.

Newt Gingrich: So these allegations against the one the chiefs of staff of these individual congressional offices were signing off on these purchase orders or invoices

Patrick Sowers: according to house rules. They needed to be signed off by the member. A chief of staff generally is, has the ability to make it, to make that decision, the signature, but every order that goes through, every purchase is approved by the office. So it’s not possible for someone to go out and spend $28,000 on equipment and the office not know about it. It hits their budget. It’s reviewed by their, at a minimum, their financial person and their chief of staff is removing that budget as every item comes through.

Newt Gingrich: And Ken Congressional offices combined their orders.

Patrick Sowers: Absolutely not. Each individual member has their own budget. They place their own orders for their own equipment.

Newt Gingrich: Okay, so knowing what we know now about Imran Awan’s case, how would it be possible for him to order that volume of equipment on checked?

Patrick Sowers: It is. It’s impossible for it to happen. Unchecked. Someone knew that money was spent. If I’m, if it came out of a member’s budget, someone in that office knows that that money was spent and what it should have been spent on.

Newt Gingrich: At one point we learned that Imran Awan had rented his primary residence to a tenant who found a box full of it materials in his garage, which raised the question of the press of how they could have gotten there and it was reported that because of how security and the delivery of it equipment, he would sometimes ship items to your home. What is the house protocol on that?

Patrick Sowers: Anything that’s shipped directly into the house has to go through the house mail system and go through testing for chemical warfare and things like that and dangerous materials. So if you needed, you know, if again, if you needed a piece of equipment and in a timely manner, you could ship it to um, an offsite location to a FedEx office or something like that. And then a staff member would be permitted to carry that onto campus. Um, so it’s not a, not an uncommon practice, especially in time-sensitive needs that you would have something shipped $28,000 worth of stuff. You need a truck to carry that and that’s not going in the back seat of your car.

Newt Gingrich: How is it that Imran Awan was able to employ several of his family members who were inexperienced in Iot services to work with him in the house?

Patrick Sowers: Well, it is against house policy to pay someone to do your job. So a legislative assistant couldn’t hire a writer to write their documents for them. A systems administrator can’t hire another systems administrator to do their job for them. And, and all intense purposes. That appears to be what the Awan’s were doing. Uh, you had a qualified it person, maybe one or two of the brothers, but then, you know, the third brother, the wife, whoever else that they brought in. Um, I don’t, I don’t know that they even actually came to the hill to do any work. And you know, that’s, you know, I, I’m not the one to judge that, but there’s no feasible way that you would, uh, that you’d have that many people in the same family working across lines like that. That’s a highly inappropriate.

Newt Gingrich: And how did it go undetected?

Patrick Sowers: Again, a member of Congress has the ability to hire anyone. They want to be on their staff member. There is no background checks, um, because they’d have to background check every staff member they hired, which is would be a big expense to the government that’s unnecessary. The members should be doing the vetting and hiring people that they trust. Um, you know, I had members of Congress that, you know, I, I had access to their personal financial information because they trusted me that much. You know, I was working on their computer and their, their checkbooks open on their, I don’t worry about just close that window. So there’s a level of trust that’s there. Um, I know one of the big issues that came up was about, uh, Iran having, uh, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, his password, very common practice with a shared employee. Uh, members are traveling, some of them are not tech savvy individuals. And having one or two shared are trusted staffers in the office that have that password is a very valuable thing with working with some members.

Newt Gingrich: So this whole notion of a trusted person, yet no one is doing background checks or even necessarily vetting members of their own staff. We’re under the impression that every shared employee or it employee for that matter, anybody working in Congress would have background checks.

Patrick Sowers: The congressman has a right to fill his staff with whoever he sees fit. Um, presumably it’s people from his district or other known quantities of an individual that they can trust. Um, there are security checks in place. The average, you know, uh, La or LC legislative assistant or legislative correspondent. Devin doesn’t have access to the files of any other staff or in the office, it’s sectioned off so that you have access to your section of documents and other people don’t. But then as you increase and staff level, the Legislative director can obviously be a legislative director, can obviously see the documents, have all the laas below them, and then you have the chief of staff can obviously see everything in the office, every email sent in and out by every staff or they have access to,

Newt Gingrich: and that’s not through a shared drive. That’s just generally if they need to look at what you’re doing, they can see it easily.

Patrick Sowers: Yeah, absolutely. There’s got to be checks and balances in any organization. As you know, the, the chief of staff is basically, you know, the president of a company if you want to look at it that way and they need to have checks and balances at every level below them. So they need to have access to that information. You know, if there’s something ever called into questions ethics wise, they need to be able to go back and look at that and not necessarily let the, the lower level, lower level staff or know that it’s being looked at.

Newt Gingrich: So what you’re implying here is.

Peter Sowers: he didn’t hack anybody. He had access back in October of 2004 when I started on the hill, the house was actually already moving towards a shared server environment. Um, there were still offices that had, there’s still offices that had servers in their office, but it was a dinosaur and they were going away. There was a trust issue. You know, you were used to having your data in your office and now you were handing it over to the hill to watch over it for you. Um, but it’s, you know, it’s a very cost effective way to manage data. Uh, and it’s a, it’s a good use of taxpayer money. With that being said, the security that’s in place, each individual member has their own section of the server. It is secured, it is monitored. So only people that have rights to access that data can get to that data. There’s no hacking across lines.

Patrick Sowers: It is an internal environment that’s not open to the outside. So anybody that was in there was granted access by someone to be in each individual section. So as a, as a shared staff member working for eight different members, I would have access into eight different sections of that server. One for each member of Congress. So if you were working for 25, 30 different offices along with your brothers and your wife, you would have access to 25 or 30 different sections of the server. Now, not just member data is there, each caucus, each committee has it. We’ll have a section of that server space as well. Um, but I, I fully trust that the house it department is secured and monitoring it. Uh, the folks they have, uh, managing that system. Every keystroke that they make on their keyboard is recorded. So there’s no chance that a rogue it person is hacking into that. It’s intentional access that’s intentionally given.

Newt Gingrich: The one other question which you really have nicely just answered is can it be hacked from the outside?

Peter Sowers: Anything is possible Um, these systems are accessible not only in DC but back in the state. So, you know, I t it’s possible the house has more than one security and course, I can’t comment on what they are, but they have one more than one firewall security protocol in place to prevent that from happening. The, the odds on this being hacked are extremely slim. Number one, there’s no financial data there at all. There’s personal information about constituents who are having casework done, but there’s, there’s no financial gain. There’s no real embarrassment there, uh, to hack into this sort of data. So I don’t see a huge fear in that. There was an, uh, a contractor to the hill probably about eight years ago. Their server got hacked. Um, but there’s, it was controlled by the contractor and the house took immediate action against that contractor, uh, to make sure that their it process, uh, their, it infrastructure came up to the house standard and patched whatever hole it was left and they paid a dire consequence for not being secure.

Newt Gingrich: Okay. So the other perplexing thing about this case is the ige comes out with their report and says, subject matter urgent. We know that there’s some invasion on our servers here in the house. You need to get rid of these five people asap. And then you fast forward. And that was I believe February of 2017 and then July 3rd, 2018 there’s a plea agreement in section eight of the plea agreement clearly states that the government says no, nothing went wrong. Tell me if you can a little about the IG report. When it first came out,

Patrick Sowers: the IG sent out a notice to all members of Congress that there had been a breach. Um, there had been some sort of mal thesis committed by a group of people. There had been evidence and it’s my understanding that they had been watching them for a period of time to know that something had occurred. Then to have a year or more later to have them come back and say nothing to see here is impossible. If you know the, the FBI misses things every once in awhile, but you don’t suspend the access to the servers. You don’t just all of a sudden decide this person has done something and then come back. We know things occurred. We know that we were told that that the terabyte of data, we know, we were told about the breaches to the systems, the unauthorized access, the access from foreign countries to the system. So knowing those things, for them to come back and say nothing to see here is a slap in the face of every intelligent person they should.

Patrick Sowers: The only acceptable outcome would have been these are the things they did wrong in. This is what we’re going to do about it. The other outcome is we’ve done further investigation and yes, these things were done. These were against house policy, house security policy, and there were violations, but nothing reached the point of a criminal charge that would have been an acceptable statement to me as an intelligent it individual, but to stack up all the evidence, go through everything you went through with the investigation and to say nothing to see here that that’s not acceptable to me.

Newt Gingrich: And when the IG report comes out and they ask every member of Congress to reconsider having the awards in their employee all but one member of Congress fires them the day the IG report comes out.

Patrick Sowers: 46:48 Yeah. All but one member of Congress, uh, as, as I’ve as I understand all but one member of Congress removed them from staff. Um, that member chose to keep them on. They did not have systems administration access to house. It suspended their right to have that. So what services they were continuing to provide, I don’t know because they didn’t have access to do that. So one, they weren’t providing service or two, they were doing it against house it policy by someone else obtaining those credentials and allowing him to use them.

Newt Gingrich: 47:15 And just to be 100% clear. Every time you log on as a systems administrator to the individual member of Congress’s server, that triggers HR to track. You’ve logged on at this day and time and you’ve done the following things.

Patrick Sowers: 47 It’s always tracked when every anyone logs into the network, you log in, you log out, what applications did you access while you were logged in? That is tracked when anybody logs in, uh, administrators, every time they make a change to anything. File access, user permissions, emails that is tracked, what they did when they did it, and you know how it happened. So if you go in, I can go in and give myself access as an administrator to anyone’s email box and look at their emails while that needs to be tracked. So if I’m going in and granting permissions that needs to be known, hey, how does someone know about this email? It’s in my private box. Well then they can go back to the log and see that. So there’s not a police state where someone is sitting there and just watching every as they log in. But if something was to occur, there would be a log to go back and look at

Newt Gingrich: 48:20 what policies have changed.

Patrick Sowers: 48:21 Talking to several friends who are still shared employees up there, the communication between house it and the shared staff has increased. I want to say there was an animosity between the two groups, but there was, there was never a, a cohesive time where they work together. And I think that’s dramatically changed since the Imran Awan scandal. Um, it’s given her, um, a reason to communicate more other than its, you know, then a good reason it was, there’s a security reason. We need to get more involved with these folks and understand them better as far as working with them on policy changes. Uh, I’m hearing there’s a lot more communication back and forth. They’re taking a lot more input from the people who are in the office every day doing things to, you know, we implemented this new policy. It’s affecting you. How well, how can we adapt it so that it’s still secure yet gives you the freedom to do your job. Thank you Patrick.

Newt Gingrich: next I’ll talk with Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas. He was one of the first voices in Congress to ask for more information about the awards and the details of their breach. And he was stonewalled that story. Next,

Newt Gingrich: I’m pleased to introduce Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas. He was one of the leading voices requesting more information about the awan’s and the possible breach. Congressman, how did you first hear about Imran Awan and his activities in the house?

Louie Gohmert: I had heard a rumor that there was a breach of congressional computer

Louie Gohmert: system, the house and that it was probably just Democrats who weren’t sure, but probably just Democrats, uh, that they had an it or a computer professional that was working for many of the Democrats. But I asked for a briefing, I asked for information on it because it didn’t seem that Speaker Ryan or really anybody was all that concerned about. And I was very concerned. So we got a briefing. It was set up for a specific time and place and any Republican members that were interested could come because it was arranged through the speaker. And we had the, um, is the chairman of the House, um, administrative committee. We had the chief accounting officer for the house and his deputy. And there was a lot of talk for a good while about it, but there was no real information about what had happened. And that gave me great concern.

Louie Gohmert: You know, I had been a prosecutor before, I have been a felony judge before a chief justice of an intermediate court of Appeals. And you know, I just wasn’t used to having people give me information that was vague, ambiguous, and was not full of facts. It was just kind of the run room.

Newt Gingrich: Can you describe for our listeners how they were vague?

Louie Gohmert: Well, like what kind of breach was there? Who did it? And we got, we did get information on who was involved. Imran Awan was the, um, we were told the it specialist that had started like 14 years ago, something like that. But around 2005, somewhere in that neighborhood, uh, as a computer specialists for a Democrat and others started hiring him and they kept adding people. And that, uh, there was a group of it specialists that were working for 40 or so democrats, but that was about as specific as it got.

Louie Gohmert: And I was wanting to know more, you know, what kind of breaches, what, what kind of investigation is there any outside information or any outside entities that have gotten information through these people? And they’re just were terribly inadequate answers just in general. Well, we don’t think there is any major problem. We don’t think that this uh, is, is compromised our system. We don’t think that a, any crime was committed. That’s what I mean by being vague. And I’m like, like I said, I’ve made presentations to a grand jury before and that’s not the kind of information you give. If there was potential for a crime, you asked the questions, you get specific answers and not just, well we don’t think this was a problem. That’s not an adequate answer.

Newt Gingrich: What kinds of things were you hearing that piqued your interest and made you want to request a briefing?

Louie Gohmert: There was someone that had been hired by some of the Democrats who one or more who may have possibly breached our computer system of more than just the Democrats and there may have been, you know, illegal activity, just that kind of thing. Just enough to do it. Well, if that’s a possibility, what have we found out? What’s the determination? And was shocked when there were nothing but vague answers. Well, we don’t think this is occurred. Well how did you investigate? Well, you know, we don’t want to get too specific because it is an ongoing investigation. Well that’s what the FBI often does to keep from answering specifically. Well there’s an ongoing investigation and we were assured that this was ongoing. It was very thorough and it was quite some time. But before we found out it may have been ongoing, but it was anything but thorough.

Newt Gingrich: And then when January came around, what happened?

Louie Gohmert: Well, in January as I understand it, the inspector general was investigating and compiled a great deal of information. And this didn’t, this did not come out in that initial briefing. We got that. I was saying, I thought it was very unsatisfactory, uh, without any real specifics. There absolutely had to been crimes committed under federal law. If you knowingly falsify any document, a procurement document that is a felony crime under federal law. And we were understanding that, um, Imran Awan or family members that they were aware that if you make a purchase of anything on behalf of a member of the House of Representatives and it costs more than $500, you have to specifically get down the serial number and that item is kept in your inventory. And if that item ever disappears, somebody is supposed to be made to account. If, I mean like we’ve had a couch that somebody probably in the 80s lost the couch.

Louie Gohmert: We have no idea where it went. They probably just moved it out of their office, but we have not been allowed to right off that couch even though it hadn’t probably been around for 30 years. They’d say no, it that, and so when I’m hearing there had been purchases of our pads that cost around $798 and there were procurement documents prepared by either Imran or somebody in his family, one of his workers to say it costs $498. Well that seems to be pretty clear. They’re trying to get under the requirement of keeping the serial number, which would then allow you to take those items and sell them and nobody would have be able to account for where, what was specifically purchased with the serial number and where it specifically went.

Newt Gingrich: Let’s talk about the three things that Imran Awan And his family are accused of. One is dummying the invoices, so they don’t have to be tracked with a barcode through the it system. So let me ask you about that for a second. Because Patrick Sowers who also held an IT specialist position similar to Imran Awan explains that it’s up to the member of the house who hires their shared employee to discover or decide on running a background check on them.

Louie Gohmert: Background checks are supposed to be done, um, for it specialists. The exception is if you work for multiple members of Congress, then another member of Congress can sign a form saying, you know, this individual works for multiple members of Congress. And so a background check is not necessary in this particular case. Well, the reason a member of Congress is allowed to sign that, the reasoning is that they’ve already had a background check from some other member of Congress and this person also works for others. So every single member of Congress shouldn’t have to get a background check on an IT specialist when it’s already been done. But in the case of the ones they got the forms signed saying that’s not necessary, but nobody ever did one. So that policy has been clarified as I understand it, so that there has to be one now. But in his case, his family’s case, his employees cases, it apparently wasn’t done.

Newt Gingrich: I think one of the main questions is that there is a house it department, why wouldn’t they hold and maintain these background checks? So the member of Congress could just call them directly and say, Hey, is this guy good?

Louie Gohmert: Well that’s a very logical question and that would be a very logical thing to do. I guess you and I shouldn’t be surprised that logic has no place here in the House of Representatives. So that was not done and nobody had that. We’re aware of ever had a background check done because once the digging commenced by Luke, um, and that was following the investigation by our Ig, then come to find out there are things that should have scared anyone doing a background check. And the way the background check works, and it’s true in our intelligence agencies, but anything that an individual would want to keep private and not want anybody to know if such a thing exists in their background, then that would be potential fertile ground for compromising someone who is in a secure position as Imran Awan was. That’s our intelligence officers say we look at somebody who’s having an affair.

Louie Gohmert: If there’s something about their lives, they don’t want constituents or others in public to know than we, that scares us. This person could be compromised. A foreign country or some element, an unsavory element in our country might find out about it and use it to blackmail the individual to get to security information. Things like bankruptcy are still a matter of concern because if you’re on in tough economic situation such that you’d have to file bankruptcy, then perhaps somebody could um, either blackmail you or bribe you easily. It might make you more vulnerable to a bribe if you’re in terrible financial situation. So when we found out that there was a bankruptcy in the past, then we went, holy cow, that surely showed up in the background check. Then we found out, well no, because there was not a background check that anybody could find.

Newt Gingrich: So it is your understanding that house policy has changed on that since Imran Awan,

Louie Gohmert: my understanding is that because of Imran Awan and his family. That there has to be a background check. You can’t just have everybody for whom the specialists’ works sign the same form saying one’s not needed. Somebody has to have already done a background check before you can waive it in other offices.

Newt Gingrich: As a former prosecutor, what is the most shocking thing about this whole story to you?

Louie Gohmert: Everything. I mean, I’m sorry. It’s just every step along the way. The fact that we would have a speaker, there was a prize that our system was potentially breached. And the response is, well, let’s sit on it for a number of months until after an election. The election should not have had anything to do with that, that the response appropriately from anybody using their sense. And that’s a presumption that they have some. But you would say, we got to get to the bottom of this now. This is too important to worry about the election. Let’s find out if a foreign country, a foreign government is having access to our information. And we saw what the Democrats have made alleging that Russia had hacked the DNC computer system. So that was another shocking thing. When wikileaks had released information, exchanges, communications between Democrats, there was something like, um, you know, we need to get into Debbie Wasserman Schultz system at the computer at the d triple c and um, or the DNC, I guess.

Louie Gohmert: Yeah, the DNC, she was chair and response was in essence, well, Imran has all that information once you contact him. And so then it was particularly alarming to note find out. Apparently he was not paid by the DNC, but he was doing work for them. But he was being paid by Congress for these multiple Democrats he was working for. And then to see another independent a report that the information that was downloaded from the DNC system probably could not have been done over the Internet. That would have been too slow. There was so much information downloaded, it would add, had been somebody doing it internally. That was one indication we’d seen from an article. So, um, don’t know if that was true, but that was one of the reports. So if that were true then obviously that was an inside job and if it’s an inside job who had access?

Louie Gohmert: Well Imran did. I don’t know whether it was him or somebody else. Some people have tried to say it was the young man that was killed, but I don’t know. But it certainly should have been investigated. And the fact that the DNC, the Democratic National Committee would not even allow the FBI to review their hard drive to do an investigation hands on with their system also caused me great concern. And also was rather surprising. They were just, there were just so many aspects of that. You Go, what? They’re not even gonna let the FBI take a look at their system. They surely want to know how this got breached, but I was wrong about that. Their narrative was the Russians did it and they didn’t want anything interrupting that narrative.

Newt Gingrich: Thank you, congressman Gohmert. Thank you. As we study the plea agreement, Imran Awan signed. There’s a paragraph in the plea, paragraph eight that exempts Imran No one of any wrongdoing in Congress was the plea deal outcome, a cover up to protect many powerful members of Congress. We may never know the truth, but I invite you to take a closer look at this case on our show page at Newt’s world.com and decide for yourself. Thanks for listening.