IRS Analyst Charged with Leaking Financial Data on Michael Cohen’s Shell Corporation to Michael Avenatti

John Fry, an investigative analyst for the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation Division, was charged today with leaking the bank records of President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen to Michael Avenatti, which led to the discovery of a shady shell corporation.

The origin of the leak, which occurred in May 2018, was discovered after the Treasury Department’s inspector general launched an investigation into how Avenatti obtained the confidential financial documents.

As for Fry, Treasury Department’s Linda Cieslak said in an affidavit that the charged leaker’s job involved “supporting IRS Agents in the Northern District of California and reviewing SARs for activity that could potentially lead to a criminal investigation.”

“In this position, he has access to various law enforcement databases, included FinCEN, Palantir, which is an analytic software used by CI to integrate investigative data from multiple internal and external data sources, and the Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS), which is a database containing tax information,” they added.

Fry leaked bank information that showed Cohen setting up a shell corporation named Essential Consultants, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies like Novartis, AT&T, and even the Russian oligarch-tied investment firm Columbus Nova. Cohen created the shell around the time of Trump’s inauguration to sell major corporate players on “insights into understanding the new administration.”

Stormy Daniels’s lawyer was not the only person Fry dished Cohen’s finances to. He also called the New Yorker‘s Ronan Farrow to discuss the leak to Avanatti.

“I assume you noticed the Inspector General said they’re looking into how the info got out, so maybe another point in the ‘pro’ column for coming out guns blazing to get ahead of this,” Fry told Farrow in a message referencing the investigation that ultimately caught him.

During one of their exchanges, Fry explained that his panic at the Trump administration’s disregard for precedent caused him to release Cohen’s documents:

“I have never seen something pulled off the system. That system is a safeguard for the bank. It’s a stockpile of information. When something’s not there that should be, I immediately became concerned. That’s why I came forward… We’ve accepted this as normal, and this is not normal. Things that stand out as abnormal, like documents being removed from a system, are of grave concern to me.”

He later confided in Farrow that saying he was “terrified right now would be an understatement. This is a terrifying time to be an American, to be in this situation, and to watch all of this unfold.”

[image via Drew Angerer/Getty Images]