The war on Michael Cohen continues with the disclosure of some of his financial records:

Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’s attorney, published a memo last week that he said detailed Michael Cohen’s financial transactions…

But questions arose about how Avenatti had obtained the confidential information, especially as he referenced “3 Suspicious Activity Reports” related to Cohen’s dealings and teased more significant disclosures to come. The Treasury Department launched an inquiry into the potential leak.

Yesterday, the New Yorker published a piece by the very busy Ronan Farrow that purported to give the whistleblower’s account of why the leak occurred:

A law enforcement official leaked the documents, the official told Farrow, after becoming concerned that two reports on Cohen’s suspicious financial activity could not be found in a government database. Both of those reports, according to the New Yorker, detail even more substantial financial transactions ”” about $3 million, three times the amount of last week’s disclosures.

This is an extraordinary allegation. This whistleblower is claiming the documents went missing from the database, the more sinister ”” but so far unverifiable ”” implication being that they were purposely being withheld.

We have become quite used to this sort of abuse of confidentiality among “law enforcement officers”—who of course cannot be expected to go to authorities and discover why such reports might be missing, but must go immediately to the press (and/or to Stormy Daniels’ attorney?).

But it turns out that there might be a very good reason such information went missing:

New statement from FinCEN spox – it does limit access to SARs in ongoing investigations pic.twitter.com/aoeAwggB34

— Aruna Viswanatha (@aviswanatha) May 17, 2018

Did that happen here? Why, yes, it apparently did:

A U.S. official familiar with the process says that the SAR is not deleted or removed from the FinCEN database.

The official says users attempting to view the SAR are informed that is unavailable for viewing.

— Tom Winter (@Tom_Winter) May 17, 2018

And this:

This still makes no sense. If it's "longstanding procedure", why would someone in law enforcement not know that? Why would this whistleblower put his/herself into the jackpot over longstanding procedure? Something else is going on here.

— Ellyn (@egayle333) May 17, 2018

In his original story, Farrow actually covered the possibility of an innocent explanation for the fact that the data couldn’t be viewed:

Yes, we explain in story that SARs likely missing from search results due to restricted access (& possibility that it’s due to request from Mueller/SDNY). 7 experts agreed this is almost unheard of & source was still alarmed by what this suggested about contents of the two SARs. https://t.co/ePblKFGPkk

— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) May 17, 2018

But because that doesn’t seem sensational enough, most of the news reports of the “missing” records ignored the possibility that the omission of the material was not a coverup.

Now this particular leaker faces the possibility of a criminal charge:

FinCEN also reiterated that the Treasury inspector general is still investigating the disclosure of the one SAR document, which is a federal criminal offense.

I recall that when Michael Cohen’s papers were raided by authorities, there was speculation that the purpose of the raid was to obtain information to leak to the media to damage Cohen and Trump. I doubt that this “whistleblower” will ever be charged with anything.