least as far as we can tell unprecedented, is is it possible? is there a technical, logistical means by which a sar can be disappeared or removed from the database? so i want to point out a couple of caveats that are important for people as they digest this news. one is that we are not reporting that there is foul play here. indeed, amongst those experts, some of the first and most plausible speculation we received was maybe special counsel mueller or the southern district of new york or any jurisdiction that has a stake in perhaps lording over a particular piece of evidence came in and said please restrict this. but i think what is true regardless, rachel, is this is a murky area. not a lot of transparency or accountability. and we may never get clear answers as to how politically motivated it was if these were indeed yanked from the system. right. and we did find obscure regulations and data retention policies that say technically they reserved the right to do this, but everyon
but this official has decided to make this information public because of this quote, the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on cohen s financial activity in a government database. some financial records related to michael cohen missing from the database. here s what s going on here. banks have to file something called a suspicious activity report, s-a-r, sar, if they suspect something hinky is going on in somebody s bank account, something that looks like it might be money laundering or fraud or some kind of criminal conduct. it doesn t get you arrested but the bank has to file a suspicious activity report. they go to a law enforcement database, and then law enforcement can access that database and use it as a source for leads to go and investigate you if it turns out any of this hinky stuff your bank thinks you might be up to might turn into a criminal case. according to ronan s reporting tonight, the reports are routed to a permanent data
suspicious activity reports, three sars filed by that bank where cohen has the bank account for that little company that paid off stormy daniels that mysteriously had all that other money flowing through it for all those corporate entities. there were three sars. just one of them produced all that news and all that scandal last week. the reason that one sar was released is because the two other reports have gone walkies. somebody knew that there was supposed to be three reports and only one was there. and that someone, that law enforcement official decided to leak that one report to draw attention to what was going on here. if those two sars disappeared from this supposedly permanent government database, why is that? that database isn t supposed to have stuff missing from it. those missing reports are why this law enforcement official broke the law, himself or herself, to leak that information about cohen s bank records to the public. here is how ronan s piece ends tonight. quote, the
network. that database can be searched by tens of thousands of law enforcement and other government personnel. that document about michael cohen that was released last week according to ronan farrow s new reporting was based on one sar, one of the suspicious activity reports that was filed at the first republic bank, which is the bank where michael cohen s little shell company, essential consultants, had its bank account. that one suspicious act report included transactions between september 2017 through january of this year. but according to ronan s source, that s not the only one. there are two other suspicious activity reports about this same account at this same bank concerning this same company, and those two suspicious activity reports have apparently mysteriously disappeared from what is supposed to be that permanent database. quote, these two reports detail more than $3 million in additional transactions, triple the amount in the report
even based on seeing in the news that michael cohen is being investigated for various things that. they might want to check if it s in their jurisdiction or not or if someone else is handling it. that part of it is routine. we contacted about a dozen sources and experts that we know in this field as soon as your report came out, trying to figure out the importance of what you had brought to the public s attention tonight. and what we asked people specifically was do you know of any previous example of a sar, of a suspicious activity report existing but somehow being pulled from or hidden within the database, not being evident in the database? every single person we talked to told us they know of no other example of this. and rachel, we went through a very similar process. we talked to seven experts, people who had been involved in leadership positions around this database, and again and again they said this is highly unusual. the question that the sort of follow-on question for