Employee is charged with leaking documents
WASHINGTON >> A senior Treasury Department employee was charged Wednesday with leaking to a reporter confidential government reports about the financial transactions of Trump associates and others under scrutiny in the special counsel’s probe of Russian election interference.
The charges reflect the latest move in the Trump administration’s effort to punish leakers within the government. Earlier this week, a former senior Senate staffer pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents in a separate leak investigation.
The Treasury case centers on a dozen stories published by BuzzFeed News that described suspicious activity reports, or SARs, which are generated by banks when a financial transaction may involve illegal activity. Prosecutors charged Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards with the unauthorized disclosure of suspicious activity reports and conspiracy. The charges were filed in federal court in New York but she made her first court appearance in northern Virginia.
Edwards, 40, lives outside Richmond, Virginia, and works as a senior adviser at the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, often referred to as “FinCEN.” At a brief court appearance in Alexandria, she was released on $100,000 bond and instructed to appear next month in court in New York. She was also prohibited from speaking to anyone at FinCEN or accessing any FinCEN equipment.
Her lawyer, Peter Greenspun, declined to comment. Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Edwards “betrayed her position of trust by repeatedly disclosing highly sensitive information.”
The stories cited in the criminal complaint filed against Edwards match the headlines, wording and information contained in BuzzFeed News stories, though the court papers did not identify the news organization by name.
Those stories often focused on suspicious activity reports related to key figures in the investigation being conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller, including former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Russian diplomats and other Trump associates.
One of the stories published in September included financial transactions involving Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist who helped arrange a meeting between senior Trump advisers and a Russian lawyer in 2016 that has been a focus of the investigation.
Goldstone in an email called it “outrageous” that his “personal and private regular banking details were leaked to Buzzfeed in order to create a salacious story.”