Suspicious-Activity Reports Missing From Treasury Database

[Milchshake]

Well another huge norm has been broken

• The whistleblower who leaked Michael Cohen’s financial records is stepping forward to say why: records of bigger, potentially more sensitive, swaths of suspicious transactions appeared to be missing from a government database.
• The document that’s been making news over the past week is a “suspicious activity report”—the document filed by banks with the Treasury to flag potentially criminal activity. But it’s actually one of three—the smallest of them.
• The government maintains a database that typically includes all such records. But the whistleblower said an exhaustive search turned up not a trace of the two larger suspicious activity reports.
• Experts deeply experienced with that database agreed this was extremely unusual, and said the most likely explanation was that the contents of those two reports on Cohen were so sensitive that access had been restricted.

A law-enforcement official released the documents after finding that additional suspicious transactions did not appear in a government database.

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.

[Wyrt]

Mnuchin hiding things or Mueller having this pulled for the investigation?

[Orbitus]

Mnuchin hiding things or Mueller having this pulled for the investigation?

At this moment? Could very well be a possibility of both. I definitely wouldn't put it past that shitstain Mnuchin to do that.

[Bullettime]

We were discussing this a bit in the de facto Trump admin megathread but it's a possible big enough deal to warrant its own thread.

The interesting things here are
1. The person who leaked it had access to the information from somewhere other than the main database, meaning it spooked someone senior enough badly enough to dig in and risk jail time for the leak.
2. SARs are serious shit. It's basically a permanent record that they don't touch, even if they technically have the ability to, due to the can of worms that would be opened by an official poking around and hiding files.
3. Mueller pulling it to keep hidden is a possibility, but it raises the question of why would Mueller need to do something so extreme (in terms of Treasury protocols) and would he even have the authority to make such a demand? And shouldn't an official who would have access to the secondary safe keeping file or the authority to reach out to the bank be aware of Mueller pulling it to start with? This isn't exactly information editable by a low level staffer, much less have access to a copy that was pulled from the main database.

So while I wouldn't rule out Mueller being the reason why, given he knew about Cohen's records months ago, this has the stench of someone like Mnuchin poking his nose around.

[ati87]

I sincerely doubt that Mueller goes around deleting evidence or that anybody from the AG would allow that.

But yea some people need to deflect by trying to find the ''middle''.