An analyst with the Internal Revenue Service was charged Thursday with leaking the financial records of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen.An affidavit submitted in the case reveals that John C. Fry, the analyst, placed several phone calls to attorney Michael Avenatti before and after he accessed Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) that had been filed by Cohen’s banks with the Treasury Department.
Avenatti, an attorney for Stormy Daniels, had posted a dossier of Cohen’s financial reports on May 8, 2018. The records showed that Cohen received payments from several companies, including Novartis and AT&T, as well as a company associated with Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch.
The documents released by Avenatti also contained financial records of a different Michael Cohen.
According to an FBI agent’s affidavit, Fry first accessed the IRS’s database of SARs on May 4, 2018 and downloaded five documents related to Cohen. “Immediately” after downloading the reports, Fry called a phone number associated with Avenatti, the agent said.
Minutes after that phone call ended, Fry conducted several more searches of Cohen’s records.
Avenatti denied doing anything wrong by having contact with Fry.
“That is absurd and ridiculous. I did nothing wrong just like reporters do nothing wrong when they receive and report information,” he told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
It was later reported that Cohen’s records had been removed from the general database because they were part of ongoing investigations, not because of a cover-up.
The legal battle between Cohen, Trump and Daniels pitted Cohen and Avenatti against each other in the press.
