SDNY COURTHOUSE, January 30 – The U.S. Treasury employee accused in October of leaking Suspicious Activity Reports about Paul Manafort and others, Natalie Edwards, pleaded not guilty on January 30 in the Southern District of New York. Afterward on Worth Street, Inner City Press asked her lawer Jacob Kaplan of Brafman & Associates about a statement made during the proceeding, that another person's device was also search. Kaplan acknowledged that had been said, adding that he didn't know who it was. Video here, Vine here. Discovery will begin once a protective order has been negotiated. The next court date is April 2 at 4 pm. The prosecutor, Daniel Richenthal, gave a copy of the Information to some in attendance. Here's from what was announced in the Complaint in October: "Beginning in approximately October 2017, and lasting until the present, EDWARDS unlawfully disclosed numerous SARs to a reporter (“Reporter-1”), the substance of which were published over the course of approximately 12 articles by a news organization for which Reporter-1 wrote (“News Organization-1”). The illegally disclosed SARs pertained to, among other things, Paul Manafort, Richard Gates, the Russian Embassy, Mariia Butina, and Prevezon Alexander. EDWARDS had access to each of the pertinent SARs and saved them – along with thousands of other files containing sensitive government information – to a flash drive provided to her by FinCEN. She transmitted the SARs to Reporter-1 by means that included taking photographs of them and texting the photographs to Reporter-1 over an encrypted application. In addition to disseminating SARs to Reporter-1, EDWARDS sent Reporter-1 internal FinCEN emails appearing to relate to SARs or other information protected by the BSA, and FinCEN nonpublic memoranda, including Investigative Memos and Intelligence Assessments published by the FinCEN Intelligence Division, which contained confidential personal, business, and/or security threat assessments. At the time of EDWARDS’s arrest, 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 Reporter-1." We'll have more on this. Six weeks after Michael Cohen received a three year sentence in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, on January 28 he announced a change in defense counsel as he "continues to cooperate" in the SDNY, from Guy Petrillo and Amy Lester to Michael Monico and Gary Spevack. This comes as he postponed his Congressional testimony, which was met by talk of issuing a subpoena for him to testify. Amid the heating-up of the case(s), Inner City Press is expanding its SDNY coverage. On December 12 surrounded by a sea of cameras and tripods, it live-streamed: see Inner City Press Periscope broadcasts hereand here
