Because of May Edwards, We Understand Where the Crooked Money Goes

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

10 July 21

Yet her most important revelations as a whistleblower have fallen by the wayside, even in the criminal case the United States government has lodged against her.

n 2017, BuzzFeed News, under the byline of Jason Leopold, published the first in a series of blockbuster reports based on documents Leopold had obtained from FinCen, the office of the Department of the Treasury tasked with investigating financial crimes. This stories, and the ones that came after it, were invaluable in explaining to the country how widespread was the Russian ratfcking surrounding the 2016 Trump campaign and that year’s presidential election. It was as consequential a leak from a government source as we’d seen since the Pentagon Papers, but it didn’t have the same impact, largely because it got lost in all the other mischief the administration* was about.

On Thursday, the Washington Post ran a fascinating profile of Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, the whistleblower who gave Leopold the documents. The story was occasioned by the fact that Edwards is likely on her way to federal prison for six months.

She explained how she had tried to go through proper whistleblower channels when she witnessed corruption within the Treasury Department and did not hide that she had also gone to the press. “I could not stand by aimlessly,” she said, “as this would have been a violation of my oath of office, which is also a federal crime.”

The piece dips into the question of why some whistleblowers are celebrated the way Daniel Ellsberg has been, however belatedly, for handing over the Pentagon Papers, while some, like Edwards, get obscurity and jail sentences. The story posits that Edwards’ initial revelations were immediately drowned out by Robert Mueller’s announcement that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was the subject of the first FinCen leaks, was being charged with crimes related to his political work, including money-laundering.

More interesting, though, is the question the Post raises about why Edwards never was charged with leaking documents that led to the most devastating and wide-ranging revelations of all. Almost two years ago, a BuzzFeed reporter approached the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, an organization that’s been bulldogging international financial crimes for years. The ICIJ, beloved here in the shebeen, was responsible for the massive leaks that became known as The Paradise Papers and the Panama Papers, which showed vividly how various international tramps and thieves, many of them in various governments, shuffled and hid their money all over the world.

Their conversation would launch a team effort that would come to fruition in September 2020, with the publication of hundreds of stories involving 400 journalists in 88 countries. Branded “The FinCEN Files,” they would tell the tale of how some of the world’s biggest banks facilitate international money laundering and corruption around the world — and how the U.S. government stood back and watched it happened. By then, Edwards had been under arrest for nearly a year for her role in leaking information for what would prove to be much smaller stories. But “The FinCEN Files” was also based on documents she handed off to Leopold.

The speculative position is that Edwards got a pass on these revelations because the Biden administration found them to be beneficial to its efforts to get tough on financial crimes. Which, if true, would make the prosecution and sentencing of Edwards for her other, less consequential, leaks seem distressingly whimsical. It’s clear that we don’t really have a handle on whistleblowers these days. (Reality Winner, I suspect, would have some interesting things to say on this subject.) As in Edwards’ case, the government doesn’t even seem to have a coherent idea of what a whistleblower is. Nevertheless, because of May Edwards, we know a great deal more about the crooks embedded in most of the governments of the world. Speaking for myself, that conforms to my personal policy preferences.