U.S. Sen. Richard Burr asked Senate ethics officials Friday for a “complete review” of his February stock sales as a growing chorus of bipartisan critics called for him to resign.

Criticism escalated after reports that Burr, a North Carolina Republican, sold up to $1.7 million worth of stock around the same time he was reassuring Americans about the coronavirus crisis.

“I relied solely on public news reports to guide my decision regarding the sale of stocks on February 13,” he said in a statement. “Understanding the assumption many could make in hindsight however, I spoke this morning with the chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee and asked him to open a complete review of the matter with full transparency.”

Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also sent a letter to the Senate Ethics Committee requesting a “full and expedited” investigation.

Burr sold stocks, gave dire warning to private group before coronavirus took off in US

Burr’s statement came as criticism mounted over the sales. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 29,290.85 on Feb. 13. It fell below 20,000 this week.

U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican and North Carolina’s junior senator, said, “given the circumstances, Senator Burr owes North Carolinians an explanation.” Tillis has reported no stock transactions in the last year.

“His self-referral to the Ethics Committee for their review is appropriate, there needs to be a professional and bipartisan inquiry into this matter, which the Ethics Committee can provide,” Tillis wrote in a tweet Friday.

Several Democrats called for Burr to resign or criminal investigations.

“Sen. Burr has betrayed the trust of every North Carolinian in a time of crisis and should resign immediately,” North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin said in a statement that called on the Senate Ethics Committee, the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to open investigations.

Democratic Senate candidate Cal Cunningham, who is challenging Tillis in November, said that “it’s not enough for the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate — the SEC and DOJ must also launch their own investigations into this behavior.”

The 2012 STOCK Act prohibits profiting off “any nonpublic information derived from their positions as Members or congressional employees,” according to a Library of Congress summary. Burr was one of three senators to vote against the bill.

The American Democracy Legal Fund, a Democratic group, called for an ethics investigation. And Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington made a similar call.

And Common Cause filed complaints about Burr and three other senators not only with the Senate ethics committee but with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission about possible violation of inside trading laws.

Burr, 64, is in his third term in the U.S. Senate after serving five terms in the U.S. House. He had earlier said he would not run for re-election in 2022.

Stock sales, dire warnings

On Jan. 24, the head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious disease, briefed all U.S. senators on the coronavirus. At that point, there were just two cases in the U.S.

On Feb. 27, Reuters reported that Burr and other members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and House Intelligence Committee were receiving daily updates about the status of the virus and its impact in other countries.

The stock sales came in between. Burr said to make his decision on stock sales “I closely followed CNBC’s daily health and science reporting out of its Asia bureaus at the time.”

Burr filed financial disclosure statements with the Senate on Feb. 26 and Feb. 27, outlining stock trades made on Jan. 31, Feb. 4 and Feb. 13 — before the virus took off in the United States.

In total, the more than 30 stock sales during that time range from $708,036 to $1.92 million. The disclosures show two stock purchases, which were sold two weeks later, totaling between $16,002 and $65,000.

The wide range comes from the Senate’s broad reporting categories.

“Senator Burr filed a financial disclosure form for personal transactions made several weeks before the U.S. and financial markets showed signs of volatility due to the growing coronavirus outbreak,” his spokesperson said in a statement Thursday night.

“As the situation continues to evolve daily, he has been deeply concerned by the steep and sudden toll this pandemic is taking on our economy.”

The news of the stock sales broke on the same day that NPR reported about dire warnings that Burr gave a small group at a private event in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 27.

“There’s one thing I can tell you about this. It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history. It’s probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic,” Burr said on the tape.

Burr defended the comments in a Twitter thread Thursday night, saying, in part, that “the message I shared with my constituents is the one public health officials urged all of us to heed as the coronavirus spread increased. Be prepared.”

Burr wrote the legislation for the U.S. response to pandemics and has worked on the issue dating back to, at least, 2005. While he made a number of statements about coronavirus preparedness, nothing he said publicly matched the warnings he made in private.

In an op-ed for Fox News in early February, Burr and Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, wrote that the United States is “better prepared than ever to face emerging public health threats, like coronavirus.”

Coronavirus cases

Click or touch the map to see cases in the North Carolina area. Pan the map to see cases elsewhere in the world. The data for the map is maintained by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University and automated by the Esri Living Atlas team. Data sources are WHO, US CDC, China NHC, ECDC, and DXY. Data is updated every hour. Note: Some cases from the Diamond Princess cruise ship are grouped in Japan on this map and do not show up in the US.

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Calls for resignation

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, also has called for Burr’s resignation. So did Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“There is no greater moral crime than betraying your country in a time of crisis, and that appears to be what happened,” Carlson told his audience Thursday night.

Carlson said it appeared that Burr betrayed the country in a time of crisis.

“Maybe there’s an honest explanation for what he did. If there is, he should share it with the rest of us immediately,” Carlson said. “Otherwise, he must resign from the Senate and face prosecution for insider trading.”

Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro wrote that if Burr and Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia “took advantage of insider information on this pandemic while failing to scream from the rooftops about the dangers, the punishments, politically and legally, should be dire.”

Loeffler sold between $1 million and $2.5 million in February, according to her financial disclosures. In a tweet, she called any suggestion of impropriety “a ridiculous & baseless attack.” She said her portfolio decisions are made by “multiple third-party advisers.”

The Common Cause complaints also include Loeffler, Republican Sen. James Inhofe and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Ocasio-Cortez, a high-profile freshman Democrat from New York, called on Burr to resign on Twitter. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat and member of the House Intelligence Committee, called on Burr to suspend his chairmanship pending investigation.

Lisa Rosenberg, executive director of Open The Government, a coalition of groups seeking government transparency, also said Burr should resign.

“There were two moral failings that he exhibited,” she told The Charlotte Observer. “He had information about the severity of the coronavirus outbreak that he did not share with the public or with his constituents. . . . He put us all at risk. Then you add to that the way he cravenly . . . profited off of insider information.”

In May 2019, Burr’s committee subpoenaed Donald Trump Jr. in relation to its investigation into Russia, generating anger from some of the president’s staunchest supporters, including Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina. Meadows is transitioning to his new job as White House Chief of Staff.

A week later, Trump Jr. and the committee reached a deal for him to testify and the criticism faded away.

Burr also made news during the last financial crisis.

In 2009 he told his wife to get cash from ATM machines.

“I called my wife and I said . . . ‘I want you to go to the ATM machine, and I want you to draw out everything it will let you take,” he said. “And I want you to tomorrow, and I want you to go Sunday.’ I was convinced on Friday night that if you put a plastic card in an ATM machine the last thing you were going to get was cash.”

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