Quote:The Treasury Department employee charged Wednesday with leaking confidential financial files related to former Trump associates had a “co-conspirator” at the department who also exchanged several-hundred messages with a journalist, according to the criminal complaint.

The court papers do not name the higher-ranking “co-conspirator,” who has not been charged. But the complaint referred to the person as an "associate director" at the department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to whom defendant Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards reported.

The complaint states that this “co-conspirator not named as a defendant” exchanged more than 300 messages with a reporter through an “encrypted application.”

The documents said Edwards “initially” denied having contact with members of the media, though told the FBI she was aware that the unnamed person – as well as another FinCEN employee – had communicated with the news media.

Edwards’ dramatic arrest late Tuesday came on the heels of other high-profile, leak-related prosecutions under the Trump administration, which has pledged to go on the offensive against leakers that the president has called "traitors and cowards."

Prosecutors said Edwards saved thousands of SARs, "along with thousands of other files containing sensitive government information," to a government-provided flash drive.

She transmitted the SARs to the reporter by "taking photographs of them and texting the photographs" using an encrypted application, according to charging documents, which said Edwards eventually confessed to doing so. FBI agents obtained a pen register and trap and trace order for Edwards' cellphone during their investigation.

The files were allegedly saved to a folder on the flash drive with the file path "Debacle\Emails\Asshat."

The flash drive contained not only SARs, but also "highly sensitive material relating to Russia, Iran, and the terrorist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant," prosecutors said.

During her interviews with FBI agents, Edwards initially denied any contact with the news media and called herself a "whistleblower" who saved the SARs for "record-keeping," according to the criminal complaint. Prosecutors said Edwards had previously filed an unrelated whistleblower complaint, and had been in touch with congressional staffers regarding that complaint.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/accused...ourt-files

Now, those bolded parts represent lying to the FBI as best I can tell. That gets one an auto-conviction these days, right?

auto conviction?