United States: Senator, suspected of insider trading during pandemic, in turmoil

Influential US senator Richard Burr was forced to step down on Thursday after an accelerated investigation into open insider trading against him because he sold stocks just before the new coronavirus caused collapse of financial markets.

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"I made the decision to give up the chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee until the end of the investigation," announced the elected Republican in a statement. The work of the commission "is too important to risk disturbing him in one way or another," he added, without commenting on the suspicions that target him.

The head of the Republican majority in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, accepted his withdrawal and specified that it would be effective from Friday evening. On Wednesday evening, Richard Burr had to hand over his cell phone to FBI agents who showed up at his Washington home with a warrant, several media had previously reported.

Investigators, who are interested in his exchanges with his broker, also had access to personal data from his cloud (remote storage), said the Los Angeles Times.

These developments imply that the noose is tightening around Richard Burr: to obtain a warrant, the investigators must prove to the judges that they have enough elements to fuel their suspicions.

"This is really not the kind of decision that the FBI or the Department of Justice takes lightly: it takes several checks, the blank check of a judge and take into account the cost for the reputation of a serving senator, "said Preet Bharara, a former federal prosecutor, on Twitter.

The elected official from North Carolina is in turmoil because he sold, on February 13, shares for a value between $ 628,000 and $ 1.7 million, especially in hotel groups or the tourism sector hit hard since then by the containment measures taken to stem the pandemic.

The same day, his brother-in-law had sold him $ 280,000 worth of shares, the website ProPublica reported last week.

Double speech

However, at that date, Republican President Donald Trump was still minimizing the risks of the Covid-19 for the United States. "It's like a seasonal flu," "it will go away," "stay calm," he said throughout February.

On February 17, four days after the sale of his shares, Richard Burr himself wrote on the Fox News website that the US government was "better prepared than ever" to deal with the crisis.

The senator, thanks to his position on the Intelligence Committee, had however had access for several weeks to the warnings of the health authorities, which fueled suspicion against him, but also accusations of double talk.

On February 27, he had in a private meeting with wealthy donors shown that he understood the gravity of the situation: "it probably looks like the pandemic of 1918", he had told them, in reference to the Spanish flu who killed tens of millions of people around the world.

In late March, when the case was made public, he denied any wrongdoing. "My decision to sell the shares was based solely on public information," he said in a statement, adding that he himself asked the Senate ethics committee to investigate.

Her departure from the Intelligence Committee comes as she is finalizing her investigative report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

In addition to Mr. Burr, three other elected officials sold stocks just before the crisis broke out: Republicans Kelly Loeffler and James Inhofe, as well as Democrat Dianne Feinstein.

But, according to the New York Times, Richard Burr is the only one to have admitted to having initiated sales and their link with the Covid-19 crisis. To date, the new coronavirus has infected nearly 1.4 million Americans and killed more than 85,000 of them.