Senator’s Stock Trades Make Trouble

Here you go:

We have talked about Burr’s case a few times before. As (former?) chairman of the intelligence committee, Burr was getting daily classified briefings on the progress of the pandemic when he dumped a large portion of his stock holdings on Feb. 13. (There is also a brother-in-law involved.) A number of other senators dumped stocks around this time, some after getting those same briefings, but Burr is different. Everyone else’s defense has been some variant of “I didn’t dump stocks, I am a well-advised rich person, someone else manages my stocks, and they dumped stocks without any input from me.” That’s a good defense! It’s not insider trading if you don’t trade; if your investment manager sold your stocks without input from you then you’re fine. Of course they could be lying, but in context the defense seems pretty plausible. (Kelly Loeffler, for instance, controversially dumped about 0.6% of her portfolio at around the same time, which sure seems like the sort of thing an investment adviser would do without any input from her? You could call your adviser and say “a disaster is coming, sell everything!,” but calling them to say “a disaster is coming, sell a tiny bit!” seems pointless.)