A senior adviser at Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, was arrested in Virginia on Friday and charged with unauthorized disclosure of suspicious activity reports filed by banks and other financial institutions. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Legal Treasury employee charged with leaks to BuzzFeed about Trump advisers The senior adviser allegedly leaked financial reports, including information related to Mueller's probe.

A senior Treasury Department employee has been arrested on suspicion of leaking a large volume of confidential financial reports, including information related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into dealings between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.

Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, who is a senior adviser at Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network or FinCEN, was arrested in Virginia on Friday and charged with unauthorized disclosure of suspicious-activity reports filed by banks and other financial institutions.


The criminal complaint against Edwards lists 11 BuzzFeed stories she allegedly served as a source for by providing details on financial transactions, including some that might have financed Russian activities during the 2016 campaign season and many involving associates of President Donald Trump, including his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

Trump has complained bitterly about a wave of leaks from officials seeking to undercut his presidency. The charges against Edwards appear to offer further indications that some in the government have been releasing confidential information squarely related to the Mueller probe.

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The criminal complaint filed Tuesday alleges that at least one other person was involved in the effort to leak the so-called SARs but provides no name and few details on that individual.

The stories for which Edwards served as a source spanned a year, with the most recent one published on Monday, FBI Special Agent Emily Eckstut wrote in the complaint. Two of the articles came out last month and discussed bank transactions related to Russian businessman Emin Agalarov, who is believed to have arranged a June 2016 meeting between Russians and Trump campaign officials that has long been a focus of suspicion and of Mueller’s probe.

Edwards was questioned by FBI agents Tuesday in Virginia as they carried out a court-ordered search warrant to access her cellphone and to search her personally. Judges previously ordered a search of her personal email account and obtained real-time access to records of whom she was calling and received calls from on her phone.

Edwards also had in her possession a thumb drive containing copies of thousands of SARs, the FBI said. Some files on the drive were stored in a directory called “Debacle/Emails/Asshat,” Eckstut wrote.

During questioning Tuesday, Edwards initially denied having any contact with any member of the news media, the FBI said. However, she later admitted that “on numerous occasions, she accessed SARs on her computer, photographed them and sent those photographs to Reporter-1 using the Encrypted Application,” Eckstut wrote.

Despite the use of encrypted communications, many messages exchanged with the reporter about the SARs were found on her phone, the FBI said.

Edwards appeared briefly in federal court in Alexandria, Va., twice Wednesday afternoon. She entered the courtroom wearing a white T-shirt and pants and black sneakers. U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan advised her of the charges, which are one count of unauthorized disclosure of SARs and another of conspiracy to do so.

Prosecutor Christopher Grieco said during the hearing that each charge carries a potential penalty of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. The charges in the case are preliminary and are likely to be replaced by an indictment in the next several weeks. Two prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan joined Grieco at the proceedings Wednesday.

The first hearing was quickly recessed to await a probation office report. Edwards spoke softly with her attorney, Peter Greenspun, during the recess. Several of her family members appeared to be in the courtroom.

Court reconvened a short time later and Buchanan brought the defendant and the lawyers to the bench to discuss what she said was a concern about the “third party” to whom Edwards would be released. After that conversation, held as a white-noise machine obscured the discussion, Buchanan ordered Edwards released into the custody of her parents on a $100,000 personal recognizance bond.

No plea was entered, but the judge said Edwards’ next appearance would be in New York in about a month. Buchanan ordered her to have no contact with the person identified as a co-conspirator in the complaint or with the reporter involved.

Greenspun declined to comment to reporters after the hearing.

A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment, as did a spokesperson for BuzzFeed.

The charges against Edwards appear to be the first criminal case in which a government employee is accused of releasing information believed to be a focus of Mueller’s inquiry relating to the Trump campaign.

However, National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner was arrested in June 2017 and charged with leaking a top secret report on Russian efforts to hack systems run by state election officials. That effort is also being probed by Mueller’s investigators but it’s unclear whether that particular wave of Russian activity was connected in any way to the Trump campaign.

Winner pleaded guilty to one felony charge of leaking classified information and was sentenced in August to more than five years in prison.

In addition, in June of this year, Senate Intelligence Committee staffer James Wolfe was charged with three counts of lying in the course of a leak investigation. On Monday, he pleaded guilty to one of those felony charges as part of a plea deal.

In a speech Wednesday before Edwards’ arrest was announced, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein stressed his commitment to combating leaks — a crackdown that Trump has repeatedly urged his appointees to pursue.

“Preventing inappropriate disclosures of confidential information is one of the important issues I focused on during the past year,” Rosenstein told employees of inspectors-general offices from various federal agencies.

“Disclosing nonpublic, sensitive information you learn as a government employee may jeopardize an investigation or case; prejudice a defendant’s rights; or unfairly damage a person’s reputation. It also can violate federal laws, employee nondisclosure agreements and individual privacy rights. In some cases, it may put a witness or law enforcement officer in danger,” the deputy attorney general said. “Those leaks undermine public confidence and harm innocent people.”