Richard Burr of North Carolina and his brother-in-law, who is chairman of an independent federal agency, spoke on the phone shortly before both men sold off stocks weeks ahead of national COVID lockdowns in 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in a civil court filing.
Yet according to a new investigation, the real story is a lot shadier.
As you probably do not recall because so many other traumatic things have happened in the intervening year and half, back in February 2020, when the novel coronavirus was spreading across the country, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr cowrote an op-ed insisting that Americans had little to worry about because, he claimed, “the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus.” A couple other things Burr got up to that month? Warning “a small group of well-connected constituents” that the virus was “much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” and dumping about $1.65 million in stocks shortly before the market tanked, apparently in response to the realization that the COVID-19 situation was going to be very, very bad.Īfter news of Burr’s activities went public, the senator from North Carolina denied any wrongdoing, insisted that reporting to the contrary was a “tabloid-style hit piece,” and swore that the information on which he based his trade was public knowledge.
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