Missing files motivated the leak of Michael Cohen's financial records

[Jacque67 7,328]

Last week, several news outlets obtained financial records showing that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, had used a shell company to receive payments from various firms with business before the Trump Administration. In the days since, there has been much speculation about who leaked the confidential documents, and the Treasury Department’s inspector general has launched a probe to find the source. That source, a law-enforcement official, is speaking publicly for the first time, to The New Yorker, to explain the motivation: the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on Cohen’s financial activity in a government database. The official, worried that the information was being withheld from law enforcement, released the remaining documents.

The payments to Cohen that have emerged in the past week come primarily from a single document, a “suspicious-activity report” filed by First Republic Bank, where Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, L.L.C., maintained an account. The document detailed sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Cohen by the pharmaceutical company Novartis, the telecommunications giant A.T. & T., and an investment firm with ties to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

The report also refers to two previous suspicious-activity reports, or sars, that the bank had filed, which documented even larger flows of questionable money into Cohen’s account. Those two reports detail more than three million dollars in additional transactions—triple the amount in the report released last week. Which individuals or corporations were involved remains a mystery. But, according to the official who leaked the report, these sars were absent from the database maintained by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or fincen. The official, who has spent a career in law enforcement, told me, “I have never seen something pulled off the system. . . . That system is a safeguard for the bank. It’s a stockpile of information. When something’s not there that should be, I immediately became concerned.” The official added, “That’s why I came forward.”

Seven former government officials and other experts familiar with the Treasury Department’s fincen database expressed varying levels of concern about the missing reports. Some speculated that fincen may have restricted access to the reports due to the sensitivity of their content, which they said would be nearly unprecedented. One called the possibility “explosive.” A record-retention policy on fincen’s Web site notes that false documents or those “deemed highly sensitive” and “requiring strict limitations on access” may be transferred out of its master file. Nevertheless, a former prosecutor who spent years working with the fincen database said that she knew of no mechanism for restricting access to sars. She speculated that fincen may have taken the extraordinary step of restricting access “because of the highly sensitive nature of a potential investigation. It may be that someone reached out to fincen to ask to limit disclosure of certain sars related to an investigation, whether it was the special counsel or the Southern District of New York.” (The special counsel, Robert Mueller, is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. The Southern District is investigating Cohen, and the F.B.I. raided his office and hotel room last month.)

[Jacque67 7,328]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/missing-files-motivated-the-leak-of-michael-cohens-financial-records

 

oh...Farrow rocking it. No wonder Don the Con wants to get rid of cybersecurity...

[Jacque67 7,328]

Oh...

 

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonaleopold/cohen-sars

 

records implicate Trump? Time for Mnuchin to lawyer up. Must say, Mikey is looking disheveled of late.

[jg121783 3,921]

Over a year and all we have are false charges against Flynn and Manifort that are falling apart and charges against some Russians that Mueller wants to drop to avoid an embarrassing discovery process.

[Cyberfx1024 7,980]

On ‎5‎/‎16‎/‎2018 at 7:01 PM, Jacque67 said:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/missing-files-motivated-the-leak-of-michael-cohens-financial-records

 

oh...Farrow rocking it. No wonder Don the Con wants to get rid of cybersecurity...

How does he want to get rid of cybersecurity? The Feds are actually ramping it up not getting rid of it.

[Jacque67 7,328]

4 hours ago, cyberfx1024 said:

How does he want to get rid of cybersecurity? The Feds are actually ramping it up not getting rid of it.

Yo, don't make me do homework,man!

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-eliminates-job-national-cybersecurity-coordinator-n874511