Fat Pig Ex-Treasury Department Official Pleads Guilty To Leaking Trump Associates' Financial Documents To BuzzFeed

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A former Treasury Department official pleaded guilty in federal
court in New York City on Monday to leaking sensitive financial
records of multiple Trump associates and figures in the Trump-
Russia investigation to a reporter at BuzzFeed News.

Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards (pictured above), who served as
a senior adviser at the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes
Enforcement Network (FinCEN), pleaded guilty to conspiring to
disclose Suspicious Activities Reports, known as SARs.

From October 2017 until her arrest in October 2018, Edwards
provided SARs that were used in around a dozen stories published
at BuzzFeed by reporter Jason Leopold, according to prosecutors.

The SARs were of financial transactions involving Trump campaign
officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, as well as Maria Butina,
a Russian national who pleaded guilty to charges that she acted
as an unregistered agent. BuzzFeed also published stories based
on SARs filed on the Russian embassy and several of the Russians
involved in the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting.

Banks are required by law to file SARs with the Treasury
Department if they observe suspicious financial activity in
clients’ accounts. It is a federal crime to disclose the
documents.

Edwards admitted to transmitting the SARs to Leopold by
photographing the reporters and sending them over encrypted
messaging applications. She was arrested with a flash drive
containing the SARs, as well as a cell phone that held
communications on an encrypted messaging app with Leopold,
prosecutors said.

“As she has now admitted, Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, a
former senior-level FinCEN employee, abused her position of
trust by agreeing to repeatedly disclose highly sensitive
information contained in Suspicious Activity Reports,” Geoffrey
S. Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New
York, said in a statement announcing Edwards’s guilty plea.

“Maintaining the confidentiality of SARs, which are filed by
banks and other financial institutions to alert law enforcement
to potentially illegal transactions, is essential to permit them
to serve their statutory function, and the defendant’s conduct
violated the integrity of that critical system and the law.”

Edwards, who was arrested Oct. 16, 2018, initially pleaded not
guilty in the case. She faces a maximum sentence of five years
in prison.

The Justice Department has aggressively pursued leaks
investigations during the Trump administration, thanks in part
to an uptick in anti-Trump leaks.

On Feb. 28, 2019, a grand jury in California indicted an IRS
analyst who leaked SARs filed against former Trump lawyer
Michael Cohen. The analyst, John Fry, leaked the records to
Michael Avenatti, the disgraced former attorney for Stormy
Daniels, and to journalist Ronan Farrow.

On June 7, 2018, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted
James Wolfe, the former director of security for the Senate
Intelligence Committee, on charges that he lied to the FBI
regarding contacts with reporters who published stories about
Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser.

– – –

Chuck Ross is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.

https://theminnesotasun.com/2020/01/14/ex-treasury-department-
official-pleads-guilty-to-leaking-trump-associates-financial-
documents-to-buzzfeed/