Two Republican Senators Dumped Stock after early coronavirus briefings

In the final days before the coronavirus pandemic crashed fully onto American shores, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly tried to paint a rosy picture of our chances to fight the virus. He wrote op-eds and released statements, even going so far as to say the US was “lucky” to have a framework “that has put us in a better position than any other country to respond to a public health threat, like the coronavirus.” But, as first reported by NPR on Thursday, he was telling well-connected constituents that the United States was going to get clobbered.

But that’s not all Burr was doing.

According to reports Thursday afternoon from campaign finance watchdog Open Secrets and ProPublica, Burr and his wife also began selling stocks on February 13. A lot of stocks, in fact. According to OpenSecrets, the Burrs sold between $581,000 and $1.5 million in publicly traded stocks—and didn’t buy any new ones. And they didn’t sell just any stocks. They unloaded huge chunks of shares in companies that would soon see their stock prices crater as a result of the coronavirus chaos

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Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) reported the first sale of stock jointly owned by her and her husband on Jan. 24, the very day that her committee, the Senate Health Committee, hosted a private, all-senators briefing from administration officials, including the CDC director and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institutes of Health of the United States, on the coronavirus.

“Appreciate today’s briefing from the President’s top health officials on the novel coronavirus outbreak,” she tweeted about the briefing at the time.

That first transaction was a sale of stock in the company Resideo Technologies worth between $50,001 and $100,000. The company’s stock price has fallen by more than half since then, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average overall has shed approximately 10,000 points, dropping about a third of its value.

It was the first of 29 stock transactions that Loeffler and her husband made through mid-February, all but two of which were sales. One of Loeffler’s two purchases was stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in Citrix, a technology company that offers teleworking software and which has seen a small bump in its stock price since Loeffler bought in as a result of coronavirus-induced market turmoil.

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Kjbartolotta said:

Not disagreeing on this point, but DiFi's husband sold his cancer research stocks at a low back in January, so it's pretty clearly a different thing. And it will get amplified and spun as a distraction from the more clear-cut and obvious larceny, and there's not much there there. Also, Feinstein was not at the Republicans-only hearing in Feb. that lead to the sell-off.

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On Feb. 27, when the United States had 15 confirmed cases of COVID-19, President Trump was tamping down fears and suggesting that the virus could be seasonal.

"It's going to disappear. One day, it's like a miracle. It will disappear," the president said then, before adding, "it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We'll see what happens."

On that same day, Burr attended a luncheon held at a social club called the Capitol Hill Club. And he delivered a much more alarming message.

"There's one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history," he said, according to a secret recording of the remarks obtained by NPR. "It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic."

The luncheon had been organized by the Tar Heel Circle, a nonpartisan group whose membership consists of businesses and organizations in North Carolina, the state Burr represents. Membership to join the Tar Heel Circle costs between $500 and $10,000 and promises that members "enjoy interaction with top leaders and staff from Congress, the administration, and the private sector," according to the group's website.

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But in his public comments about the threat of COVID-19, Burr never offered the kind of precise warning that he delivered to the small group of his constituents.

On Feb. 7, Burr co-authored an op-ed that laid out the tools that the U.S. government had at its disposal to fight the coronavirus.

"Luckily, we have a framework in place that has put us in a better position than any other country to respond to a public health threat, like the coronavirus," Burr said in a statement on March 5.

He pressed a CDC official in early March as to why the nation's pandemic surveillance capabilities had fallen short despite the millions in funding he had helped secure for that purpose through PAHPA.

But despite his longtime interest in biohazard threats, his expertise on the subject, and his role as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Burr did not warn the public of the government actions he thought might become necessary, as he did at the luncheon on Feb. 27.

In attendance, according to a copy of the RSVP list obtained by NPR, were dozens of invited guests representing companies and organizations from North Carolina. And according to federal records, those companies or their political committees donated more than $100,000 to Burr's election campaign in 2015 and 2016.

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