FBI Serves Warrant on Sen. Richard Burr over Pre-Pandemic Stock Trades
FBI agents served a warrant at Senator Richard Burr’s (R., N.C.) Washington, D.C., home on Wednesday and confiscated his cell phone as part of an investigation into stock trades the senator made before the coronavirus pandemic sent Wall Street crashing.
A spokesperson for the senator declined to comment to reporters regarding the developments, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sold between $628,000 and $1.7 million worth of stocks on February 13, after receiving a classified briefing on the burgeoning coronavirus outbreak in January. The senator claims that the trades were made solely based on publicly-available information, and has asked the Senate Ethics Committee to review the trades.
On February 27, Burr described the coronavirus in stark terms in a private meeting organized by the Tar Heel Circle, a nonpartisan group of North Carolina businesses.
“There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” Burr said in comments obtained by NPR. “It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”
Fellow North Carolina senator Thom Tillis in April indicated that Burr should be as forthright as possible regarding the trades.
“Regardless of what happens with the investigation, I think Senator Burr owes everybody in North Carolina and the United States an explanation, and we’ll see where the investigation goes,” Thillis said on The Hugh Hewitt Show.
