A U.S. Moneys employee has been arrested on charges that she leaked to BuzzFeed Story multiple reports about suspicious financial transactions involving ex-Trump stump chief Paul Manafort, law-enforcement officials said.
The highly intimate documents allegedly leaked by the employee also were related to erstwhile Trump campaign official Richard Gates, accused Russian emissary Maria Butina, a suspected Russian money launderering entity and the Russian Embassy in Washington, according to a wrong complaint.
Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, a 40-year-old senior advisor in Cache’s financial crimes enforcement network who was arrested Tuesday, will clock federal criminal charges in New York, officials said.
She is charged with unlawfully snitching so-called suspicious activity reports, or SARS, and conspiracy to do the same. Both felony reckon ons carry a maxmium potential sentence of five years in prison.
A Quinton, Virginia, staying, Edwards was released on a $100,000 personal recognizance bond after her presentment Wednesday afternoon in U.S. Locale Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Under the conditions of her release, Edwards is barred from contacting reporters or handling documents belonging to her Treasury allotment without approval.
A lawyer for Edwards did not immediately respond to a request for remark.
SARS are used to alert Treasury officials and other authorities regarding financial transactions that may be related to criminal conduct, such as mazuma laundering. Treasury’s FinCEN division, for which Edwards works, controls the collection of SARS. It is illegal for a government employee to disclose a SAR or its contents different of the scope of their work.
The complaint against Edwards says that she started leaking “numerous SARS in October 2017” to an unmarked reporter, and continued doing so until this month.
She had “hundreds of electronic communications” with the photojournalist, “many via an encrypted application,” the complaint said.
After Edwards began leaking SARS, the anchorman wrote about a dozen articles which mentioned the details of those descriptions, according to the complaint.
Articles cited in the complaint carry the bylines of Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier, two BuzzFeed stringers, as well as other journalists at that media outlet.
The articles cited instruments transactions pertaining to Manafort and Gates, both of whom have since pleaded ashamed to financial crimes related to their consulting work for a pro-Russia federal party in Ukraine.
They also related to Butina, who is currently being submitted without bond on charges of being a Russian agent, the accused funds launderering real-estate entity Prevezon Alexander, and the Russian Embassy in Washington.
At the hour of Edwards’ arrest, according to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, she “was in possession of a flickering drive” that appeared to be the same device “on which she saved the unlawfully snitched” SARS.
Also in her possession was “a cellphone containing numerous communications across an encrypted application in which she transmitted [SARS] and other sensitive supervision information” illegally, prosecutors said.
“When questioned by law enforcement officials [Tuesday], Edwards confessed she has offered [SARS] to [the reporter] via an encrypted application, through falsely denied qualified that [the reporter] intended to or did publish that information” through a expos organization, the complaint said.
BuzzFeed News declined to comment. Leopold and Cormier did not in a jiffy return requests for comment.
— Additional reporting by CNBC’s Tucker Higgins