Congress quietly pays $850,000 to Muslim aides unfairly targeted

The House of Representatives quietly paid $850,000 this year to settle wrongful termination claims by five Pakistani-American technology specialists, after a set of routine workplace allegations against them morphed into fodder for right-wing conspiracy theories amplified by President Donald Trump.

Together, the payments represent one of the largest known awards by the House to resolve discrimination or harassment claims.

But aides involved in the settlement said it was also an attempt to bring a close to a convoluted saga that led to one of the most durable — and misleading — story lines of the Trump era. The aides said its size reflected a bid to do right by a group of former employees who lost their jobs and endured harassment in part because of their Muslim faith and South Asian origins.

What started as a relatively ordinary House inquiry into procurement irregularities by Imran Awan, three members of his family and a friend, who had a bustling practice providing members of Congress with technology support, was twisted into lurid accusations of hacking government information.

In 2018, Trump stood next to President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and implied that one of the employees involved in the House case — a "Pakistani gentleman," he said — could have been responsible for stealing e-mails of Democratic officials leaked during the 2016 campaign. His own intelligence agencies had concluded that the stolen e-mails were part of an election interference campaign ordered by Moscow.

The case originated in 2016, when officials in the House, then controlled by Republicans, began investigating claims that the specialists had improperly accounted for purchases of equipment and bent employment rules as they worked part time for the offices of dozens of Democratic lawmakers. In the hands of the chamber's inspector general and later the Capitol Police, the investigation expanded to include concerns that the workers had illicitly gained access to, transferred or removed government data and stolen equipment.

In early 2017, the House stripped their access to congressional servers, making it impossible for them to continue their work. One by one, the lawmakers terminated them.

But as the inspector general's findings were shared with Republican lawmakers and trickled into conservative media in early 2017, they began to take on a life of their own. The Daily Caller, which led the way, published allegations that the workers had hacked into congressional computer networks, and other right-wing pundits speculated that the group were Pakistani spies.

In the summer of 2018, the Justice Department concluded that it had found "no evidence" that Awan illegally removed data, stole or destroyed House equipment, or improperly gained access to sensitive information.