It appears Richard Burr wasn’t the only person privy to his insider knowledge to profit off the Covid downturn.
Last year the FBI seized Senator Richard Burr’s (R-NC) phone in connection with the federal probe into his stock trades.
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Burr dumped as much as $1.72 million in hotel stocks before the Coronavirus panic hit the US while reassuring the public about Coronavirus preparedness.
This was also at the same time Burr was receiving daily briefings on the Coronavirus health threat.
Privately Burr sounded the alarm and compared Coronavirus to the 1918 “Spanish Flu” that nearly wiped out 10% of the world’s population at the time — including 675,000 Americans by some estimates.
“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,” he said, according to a secret recording obtained by NPR. “It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”
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Publicly, however, Burr downplayed the virus.
Burr previously said he got his information from public news reports.
“I relied solely on public news reports to guide my decisions regarding the sale of stocks on February 13,” Burr said. “Specifically, I closely followed CNBC’s daily health and science reporting out of its Asia bureaus at the time.”
Now this…
Last year Richard Burr’s brother-in-law called his broker and dumped stock just one minute after getting off the phone with the North Carolina senator, according to a report by ProPublica.
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After Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped more than $1.6 million in stocks in February 2020 a week before the coronavirus market crash, he called his brother-in-law, according to a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
They talked for 50 seconds.
Burr, according to the SEC, had material nonpublic information regarding the incoming economic impact of coronavirus.
The very next minute, Burr’s brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, called his broker.
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ProPublica previously reported that Fauth, a member of the National Mediation Board, had dumped stock the same day Burr did. But it was previously unknown that Burr and Fauth spoke that day, and that their contact came just before Fauth began the process of dumping stock himself.
In the filings, the SEC also revealed that there is an ongoing insider trading investigation into both Burr and Fauth’s trades.
Read the full report here.
Source material can be found at this site.
