Asher Stockler at Newsweek:
alls are mounting for an investigation into Republican Senators Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler for potential violations of the 2012 STOCK Act—a law Burr voted against when it cleared the Senate eight years ago.
Reports Thursday showed that the senators, who hold powerful committee assignments, dumped millions of dollars of stock ahead of the recent coronavirus-induced market panic.
By Friday, the two faced steep criticism of their actions, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) filed a complaint against them with the Senate Ethics Committee, saying the sales possibly violated the STOCK Act, an insider-trading ban for members of Congress.
Noah Bookbinder, CREW's executive director, said that Burr's actions "should be investigated right away."
Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sold off between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on February 13, ProPublica found. Some of his largest transactions involved shares of hotel chains that would lose between one-half and two-thirds of their value in the economic turbulence weeks later.
Reuters reported that his committee had been receiving daily updates on the novel coronavirus.
Loeffler, who sits on the Senate committee with oversight of the health care industry, unloaded between $1,275,000 and $3,100,000 in stocks jointly owned with her husband, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, from late-January to mid-February. The Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hosted a coronavirus briefing, with top administration officials, for the entire membership of the Senate on the same day that Loeffler's portfolio began these trades, The Daily Beast reported.
In a statement Friday, Burr said his decision relied on public reporting but called for an ethics inquiry into the matter. Loeffler said in a statement that her investments are controlled by a third-party advisor and that she was unaware of the trades
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