An agent with the Internal Revenue Service based in San Francisco has been charged with the unlawful disclosure of transaction reports connected with Trump fixer Michael Cohen.
As the East Bay Times reports, 54-year-old investigative analyst John C. Fry allegedly "downloaded five reports pertaining to a corporation Cohen set up that drew the attention of IRS investigators in May 2018."
According to a just-unsealed criminal complaint, federal prosecutors say that Fry "conducted numerous searches related to the taxpayer," who was Cohen, and proceeded to share what he found with a Los Angeles attorney (Stormy Daniels' lawyer Michael Avenatti) and a New York reporter (Rowan Farrow from The New Yorker).
Farrow then quoted Fry as an anonymous source in this May 16 piece about the Stormy Daniels case.
Using information obtained from Avenatti, the Washington Post ran this story on May 8 titled "How money flowed through Michael Cohen’s multi-purpose shell company."
Fry is currently out on a $50,000 bond, and he's scheduled back in federal court on March 13 for "preliminary hearing or arraignment on indictment." Prosecutors say that Fry admitted to doing the leaking in a November interview.
On Tuesday, the New York Times published the results of an extensive investigation into Trump's "two-year war on the investigations encircling him." The paper found that there has been a "sustained, more secretive assault by Mr. Trump on the machinery of federal law enforcement" than has been previously publicly known, though we all know that Trump has repeatedly attempted to erode the public's confidence in the FBI.
As part of his efforts to contain the ongoing legal crises he faces, Trump reportedly tried to install a loyalist in New York's Southern District, US attorney Geoffrey S. Berman, as the new person in charge of the investigations into Trump's hush-money payments, like the one apparently made to Stormy Daniels in 2016. Berman, it turned out, had already recused himself.