Prosecutors said Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards had illegally shared department reports on suspicious banking activity.
The federal authorities arrested a Treasury Department official on Wednesday and charged her with illegally showing a journalist secret reports about suspicious wire transfers by President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and others.
The Treasury official, Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, was arrested near Washington. She was charged with one count of unauthorized disclosure of the so-called suspicious activity reports, which banks use to flag potentially problematic transactions to the authorities, and one count of conspiracy to disclose the reports.
Her lawyer, Peter Greenspun, declined to comment.
The case is part of a crackdown by the Trump administration on leaks to journalists. On Monday, a former Senate Intelligence Committee aide pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about whether he shared information with a reporter.
Disclosing suspicious activity reports to anyone who is unauthorized to see them is against the law, and the reports seldom — if ever — make their way into the public domain.
Prosecutors said Ms. Edwards had shared reports about transactions involving Mr. Manafort, his deputy Rick Gates, the Russian Embassy, the accused Russian spy Maria Butina and a Russian company that had been accused of money laundering. The reports had been filed by various banks to the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, where Ms. Edwards was a senior adviser.
Prosecutors didn’t name the journalist who received the reports or the news organization that published articles about them.
Headlines and quotes that were cited in the court papers matched articles published by BuzzFeed News; each article had the byline of a BuzzFeed investigative reporter, Jason Leopold.
Mr. Leopold and a BuzzFeed spokesman declined to comment.
Beginning in 2017, BuzzFeed published a series of articles detailing suspicious banking transactions that were under scrutiny by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The BuzzFeed articles cited suspicious activity reports as their source about the transactions.
Because suspicious activity reports contain detailed personal information about bank customers’ activities, they can serve as a foundation for criminal cases. Officials say keeping them secret is key to persuading banks to be so forthcoming.
“Protecting sensitive information is one of our most critical responsibilities,” said Sigal Mandelker, the Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, in a statement on Wednesday. She added that the Treasury had “fully and proactively supported” a leak investigation by the department’s independent watchdog, which worked with federal prosecutors on the case.
Prosecutions for leaking suspicious activity reports are rare. The most recent one was in 2012, when an F. B. I. agent tried to bribe a Bangladeshi politician by selling his rival a suspicious activity report about him. The F. B. I. agent pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison.
