Treasury employee accused of leaking documents to reporters

A U.S. Treasury Department employee has been charged with leaking confidential financial documents to reporters, writes Dan Mangan of CNBC.com.

Mangan writes, “Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, a 40-year-old senior advisor in Treasury’s financial crimes enforcement network, will face criminal charges in New York. Edwards, who was arrested Tuesday, is due to appear before a judge in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia later Wednesday.

“The criminal complaint against Edwards says that she started leaking ‘numerous’ so-called suspicious activity reports, known as SARS, in October 2017 to a reporter, and continued doing so until this month.

“The unidentified journalist then wrote about a dozen articles which mentioned the details of those reports, according to the complaint. Articles cited in the complaint carry the bylines of Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier, two reporters at BuzzFeed, among other journalists at the media outlet.

“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.”

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