Targeting whistleblowers in his White House was a specialty of former President Barack Obama. Now the Trump administration is following the same course.
A senior official working for the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has been charged with leaking confidential financial reports on former Trump campaign advisers Paul Manafort, Richard Gates and others to a media outlet.
The charges are the latest indication of the Trump administration’s efforts to root out alleged leakers within the government, something that prosecutors emphasized in announcing the charges today.
Prosecutors claim that Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, a senior adviser to FinCEN, photographed what are called suspicious activity reports, or SARs, and other sensitive government files and sent them to an unnamed reporter, in violation of U.S. law.
The unauthorized document disclosures, which began last October, are said to have provided the basis for 12 news articles published by an unnamed news organization.
Edwards is being charged in the Southern District of New York with one count of unauthorized disclosures of suspicious activity reports and one count of conspiracy to make unauthorized disclosures of suspicious activity reports, both of which carry a maximum five years in prison.
“We hope today’s charges remind those in positions of trust within government agencies that the unlawful sharing of sensitive documents will not be tolerated and will be met with swift justice by this Office,” U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a statement.
Cracking down on whistleblowers in the government started in earnest during the Obama years.
As I wrote in my book Front Row Seat at the Circus:
In fact, in 2015 the Associated Press concluded the Obama administration “more often than ever” censored government files or outright denied access to them under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
“What we discovered reaffirmed what we have seen all too frequently in recent years,” said Gary Pruitt, AP’s chief executive. “The systems created to give citizens information about their government are badly broken and getting worse all the time.”
More concerning is the prosecution of whistleblowers during Obama’s presidency and increased electronic surveillance programs to track down government employees who speak to the press.
Robert Greenwald, director of the film War on Whistleblowers told me: “Journalists more and more are being targeted, are being threatened, pressure is being put on them. The Obama administration is literally punishing the whistleblowers, trying to pass laws that make it harder for whistleblowers, and the danger is the only way we find out about the national security state is by these people coming forward.”
Government transparency is not likely a word that future historians will attach to the Obama legacy,
Unfortunately, transparency is not a word that historians will associate with the Trump era either.