Sen. Richard Burr, who was privy to secret briefings about the coronavirus when he cashed out a large portion of his net worth in stock, may also have engaged in securities fraud.
As ProPublica reported, Burr’s statutorily mandated trading reports disclose that he dumped between $628,000 and $1.7 million of stock on February 13, in 33 separate transactions. The stocks Burr cashed out of, two weeks before the markets began to plunge, quite possibly made up the bulk of his net worth, which Roll Call estimated totaled $1.7 million in 2018. In January, Burr publicly declared that the nation was “better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus.” But Burr had been receiving regular, secret briefings about the imminent coronavirus threat, and secretly warned political insiders the nation faced an imminent catastrophe on par with the worst influenza pandemic in modern history.
It’s as yet unclear whether Burr’s stock dump constituted securities fraud, but it is plain that he reprehensibly violated the public trust, and therefore should not remain in office.
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