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The federal authorities on Wednesday arrested a Treasury department official and accused her of illegally showing a journalist confidential information about suspicious wire transfers from former President of the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort. among others.
The head of the Treasury, Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, was arrested near Washington. She was charged with a charge of unauthorized disclosure of so-called suspicious activity reports, which banks use to report to the authorities potentially problematic transactions, and a conspiracy leader in view disclosure of reports.
His lawyer, Peter Greenspun, declined to comment.
The case is part of a crackdown by the Trump administration against leaked journalists. On Monday, a former Senate Intelligence Committee advisor pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators on the issue of whether he was in contact with reporters. But the assistant, James A. Wolfe, denied distributing classified documents and the Justice Department did not charge him for disclosing information.
The case against Mrs. Edwards is different. Disclosure of suspicious activity reports to anyone who is not allowed to access them is against the law and reports rarely, if ever, are in the public domain. When they were interviewed by the investigators, Ms. Edwards did not deny sharing them, as shown by the documents filed by the court.
According to the Prosecutor, Mr. Manafort, his deputy Rick Gates, the Russian Embassy, the Russian spy accused Maria Butina and a Russian company accused of money laundering would be involved in the reports. They had been filed by various banks with the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, where Ms. Edwards was a senior advisor.
She and the reporter exchanged numerous phone calls and hundreds of encrypted text messages, some of which contained screenshots of the reports, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors did not appoint the journalist. Titles and citations in court documents correspond to articles published by BuzzFeed News; each article was signed by Jason Leopold, an investigative journalist. He and a spokesman for BuzzFeed declined to comment.
Since 2017, BuzzFeed has published a series of articles detailing banking transactions that have been reviewed by the special lawyer Robert S. Mueller III, which investigates the interference of Russia in the US. 2016 Presidential Election. Articles cited suspicious activity reports as the source of transactions.
Since suspicious activity reports contain detailed information about the activities of bank customers, they can serve as a basis for criminal cases. Officials say that secrecy is essential to persuade banks to be so forthright.
"The protection of sensitive information is one of our most critical responsibilities," said Sigal Mandelker, undersecretary of the Treasury of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, in a statement released Wednesday. She added that the Treasury had "fully and actively supported" a leak investigation conducted by the ministry's independent watchdog, who was working with federal prosecutors.
The lawsuits for leak of reports of suspicious activity are rare. The most recent date of 2012 a F.B.I. The agent attempted to bribe a Bangladeshi politician by selling his rival a suspicious activity report about him. The officer pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison.
But US authorities have already dried up on leaking journalists. Under the presidency of President Barack Obama, the Ministry of Justice aggressively pursued the private communications of journalists in its leak hunt, but yielded to any pressure after sharp criticism.
And last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the Justice Department's efforts to root out leaks from the government had been significantly expanded. Calling the role of the press "not unlimited", he echoed the anti-media stance of President Trump, who protested against a conspiracy "deep" bureaucrats determined to undermine his administration.
The court documents reveal that Mrs. Edwards was the kind of leak that administration officials were trying to target: an ideologically motivated cause. When she downloaded the suspicious activity reports from the Treasury storage system to a USB key, prosecutors said she had saved them in a file she created called "Debacle – Operation-CF".
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