A senior U.S. Treasury employee has been arrested and charged with leaking to news outlets about financial suspicious transactions on former Trump campaign figures Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, accused Russian agent Maria Butina and the Russian Embassy, federal authorities said Wednesday.
Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, 40, of Quinton, Virginia, and a senior adviser in the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network or FinCEN, was arrested Tuesday. She faces one count of unlawfully disclosing suspicious activity reports, or SARs, and one count of conspiracy to disclose those reports.
Each count carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Ms. Edwards is scheduled to appear before a judge late Wednesday.
Prosecutors with the Southern District of New York say Ms. Edwards leaked “numerous” SARs to a BuzzFeed News reporter starting in October 2017 and continuing through this month.
The unidentified journalist wrote roughly a dozen articles that included details from those reports, according to court documents. BuzzFeed reporters Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier have bylines on stories cited in the criminal complaint against Ms. Edwards.
Ms. Edwards transmitted the reports by taking photographs of them and texting them to the reporter over an encrypted email, according to court documents. She also shared internal FinCEN emails and other non-public reports, prosecutors said.
At the time of her arrest, Ms. Edwards had a flash drive that appeared to have the unlawfully disclosed SARs, a cellphone containing numerous communications over an encrypted application and “other sensitive government information,” prosecutors said.
At the time of her arrest, according to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, she “was in possession of a flash drive appearing to be the flash drive on which she saved the unlawfully disclosed SARs, and a cellphone containing numerous communications over an encrypted application in which she transmitted SARs and other sensitive government information to” the reporter.
More at: https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/17/senior-treasury-department-adviser-charged-with-le/