A U.S. Treasury Department official has been arrested and charged with providing an unidentified reporter from Buzzfeed with sensitive financial reports. The information reportedly related to suspicious banking transactions of several former associates of President Donald Trump relating to the investigation into election meddling from Russia by White House Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
On Wednesday, Natalie Edwards, a senior adviser in the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), was taken into custody by law enforcement officers in Alexandria, Virginia. She was charged with “unauthorized disclosure of suspicious activity reports” and “conspiracy,” both of which carry a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison.
According to Yahoo News, as far back as October 2017, Edwards disclosed suspicious activity reports connected to former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and his longtime associate Rick Gates, accused Russian agent Maria Butina, the Russian embassy, and a unit of Prevezon Holdings Ltd., a corporation owned by Russian businessman Denis Katsyv.
- Manafort was convicted in August on five counts of tax fraud, one of the four original counts of failing to disclose his foreign bank accounts, two counts of bank fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and witness tampering. In conjunction, he also has agreed to comply with the Russia investigation.
- Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI, striking a deal to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation, along with testifying against his former boss, Manafort.
- Butina is currently in jail awaiting trial after being charged with conspiracy and acting in the United States as an agent of a foreign government – namely the Russia.
Justice Department prosecutors said Edwards saved the confidential financial reports on a flash drive and sent them to the BuzzFeed reporter using an encrypted messaging application. When Edwards was arrested, she was said to have been in possession of another flash drive and a cell phone containing communications with the aforementioned reporter.
BuzzFeed reported on financial transactions of a Russian billionaire that helped arrange the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower. In the article, reporters Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold cited Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed against Rob Goldstone, an associate of the Agalarovs, the Russian family who sought the meeting by contacting the President’s son, Donald Trump Jr. After Goldstone was identified one year later as the “middleman” for the meeting, his financial institutions flagged payments that he received from the Agalarovs, thus creating the SARs within the Treasury Department.
Furthermore, the media outlet also reported on FinCEN documents related to Peter Smith, a former Republican political operative who searched for Hillary Clinton’s deleted State Department emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. Smith died last year in a Rochester, Minnesota, hotel room from “asphyxiation due to displacement of oxygen in confined space with helium,” according to Business Insider. Despite first being ruled a suicide by police, it has since become part of Mueller’s investigation, indicating that the circumstances of his death are consistent with Kremlin-backed political assassinations.
When questioned by investigators on Wednesday, Edwards “confessed that she had provided SARs to ‘Reporter-1’ via an encrypted application, though falsely denied knowing that ‘Reporter-1’ intended to or did publish that information through” a media organization.
The most recent BuzzFeed article relating to the story appeared on Monday and centered on a loan made by TD Bank to Prevezon – which Katsyv owns – which one of the transactions that was flagged in relation to Goldstone. The report cited records uncovered by FinCEN in connection with investigations by Congress and White House Counsel Mueller, leading to the uncovering of Edwards as the leak.
U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said that Edwards “betrayed her position of trust by repeatedly disclosing highly sensitive information.”
In a report from The Daily Caller, Goldstone called the leaks “outrageous.”
“I was someone whose personal and private regular banking details were leaked to BuzzFeed, in order to create a salacious story,” also exclaiming that the media outlet showed a “complete disregard for the privacy laws in making personal transaction details public.”
BuzzFeed has yet to comment on the situation.