Official charged for govt leak
WASHINGTON: Federal authorities arrested a Treasury Department official on Wednesday and charged her with illegally showing a journalist secret reports about suspicious wire transfers by President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and others.
The Treasury official, Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, was arrested near Washington.
She was charged with one count of unauthorised disclosure of the suspicious activity reports, which banks use to flag potentially problematic transactions to the authorities, and one count of conspiracy to disclose the reports. Her lawyer, Peter Greenspun, declined to comment.
The case is part of a crackdown by the Trump administration on leaks to journalists. On Monday, a former Senate Intelligence Committee aide pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about whether he had contact with reporters. But the aide, James A Wolfe, denies that he distributed classified materials, and the Justice Department has not charged him with leaking information.
The case against Ms Edwards is different. Disclosing suspicious activity reports to anyone who is unauthorised to see them is against the law, and the reports seldom — if ever — make their way into the public domain. When questioned by investigators, Ms Edwards did not deny having shared them, court filings show. Prosecutors said the reports about transactions involved Mr Manafort, his deputy Rick Gates, the Russian Embassy, the accused Russian spy Maria Butina and a Russian company that had been accused of money laundering. They had been filed by various banks to the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, where Ms Edwards was a senior adviser.
She and the journalist exchanged numerous phone calls and hundreds of encrypted text messages, some of which contained screenshots of the reports, prosecutors said. Prosecutors didn’t name the journalist.
Headlines and quotes in court papers matched articles published by BuzzFeed News; each article had the byline of Jason Leopold, a BuzzFeed investigative reporter. Mr Leopold declined to comment.