The former U.S. Treasury senior staffer who leaked tens of thousands of records laying bare investigations into the world of illicit financing globally will not be released from federal prison early, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, a 43-year-old former senior advisor to the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), claimed to have been a whistleblower when she leaked a record-breaking trove of suspicious activity reports, also known as SARs, to BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold.
BuzzFeed subsequently teamed up with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 400 journalists in 88 countries to pick apart and publish what became known as the “FinCEN Files.” As summarized by BuzzFeed, the catalogue of 200,000 suspicious financial transactions provided an “unprecedented view of global financial corruption, the banks enabling it, and the government agencies that watch as it flourishes.”
U.S. District Judge Gregory Woods, a Barack Obama appointee, found Edwards’s disclosures to be a reckless exposure of the U.S. national security secrets she was sworn to protect.
“Dr. Sours Edwards disclosed approximately 50,000 records, including at least 2,000 individual SARs, to someone who she knew intended to make them public,” Woods wrote on Tuesday. “Among the materials that Dr. Sours Edwards disclosed were leads regarding financing for the terrorist organization, Hezbollah. […] She also disclosed information...
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