Spoke with an expert on Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) who has more than a decade experience in the banking sector. The Michael Cohen report tonight in the New Yorker is a huge deal.
"Farrow's reporting is explosive because of the FinCen database and while very important, Michael Cohen can't be feeling too good right now knowing that not only did First Republic Bank catch his suspicious activity, so did others without the power of subpoena."
"Robert Mueller and his team on the Special Counsel have likely already uncovered the details of such suspicious transactions by their power to go to any bank within the US financial system to collect the bank records and piece together the potential scheme."
"Now, the question is, why would some of them be placed as highly sensitive but not all of them? It makes me think something is really bad with those payments."
When asked what "something bad" would mean, source says the originator and location of the payments would have to be "extremely dirty."
Source agreed with experts that Farrow interviewed. This situation is HIGHLY unusual. Either the information in the SARs was so damaging that FinCEN restricted access, or someone maliciously scrubbed the records.
To maliciously remove records, "you're talking about someone with technical access to "break the glass", meaning someone who likely had to get special one-time access to the database to run a script to wipe the database of those records."
Source says that there "are backed up database copies too," meaning that if the records were wiped clean, the person who did it was acting maliciously.
I asked my source to guess what happened. (S)he said, "25% malicious, I really have to hope our controls in the government has safeguards against someone going rogue and forcing someone to remove the records."
