he senior advisor at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) who was arrested and charged for the unauthorized leak of confidential bank records to a BuzzFeed journalist reportedly raised her concerns as early as the Summer of 2016, including to congressional staffers.
The latest report from BuzzFeed, headlined “Russian Agents Sought Secret US Treasury Records On Clinton Backers During 2016 Campaign,” includes information about what Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, 40, did before she was arrested for allegedly leaking Trump associates’ confidential bank records in the press.
The report indicates that there is some turmoil behind closed doors at FinCEN:
At least 10 FinCEN employees have filed formal whistleblower complaints about the department. The whistleblowers say they tried multiple times to raise concerns about issues they believed threatened national security, but that they faced retaliation instead of being heeded. Some of FinCEN’s top officials quit in anger. One senior adviser has been arrested and accused of releasing financial records to a journalist.
The arrested and accused adviser referred to in that last line was Edwards. Remarkably, Edwards is said to have raised her concerns about Russian efforts to access confidential bank records of Hillary Clinton supporters in the Summer of 2016, months before the election.
Edwards reportedly spoke with “six different congressional committee staffers to air her concerns.” Then, in July and August 2018, she purportedly met with “staffers of one of the Senate committees investigating Russian interference during the presidential campaign.” It was then that she claimed that FinCEN “withheld documents revealing suspicious financial transactions of Trump associates that the committee had requested.” Edwards and an unnamed colleague reportedly had “lawful documented evidential disclosures of violations of law, rule, and regulations, gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds, abuse of authority, and substantial and specific danger to public safety.”
She said she reported wrongdoing to basically every relevant authority, including: her immediate supervisor, the inspector general, the counterterrorism unit, and the Office of Special Counsel, to name a few.
