U.S. Senators under scrutiny after selling millions in stocks prior to coronavirus pandemic

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U.S. Lawmakers are being criticized after selling millions in stocks before the coronavirus outbreak hit U.S. markets. Yahoo Finance’s Jessica Smith joins the On The Move panel to break down the latest developments.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: But one thing that's drawn a lot of attention, and a lot of it negative, is news about senators who may have been briefed about the coming pandemic who sold stock and might have gained from insider information. Jess Smith, our correspondent in Washington, DC has more for us on this one. Jess--

JESS SMITH: Yeah, Adam. Several senators are facing criticism this morning after reports that they sold stock after being briefed about the coronavirus, but before the market started tanking. Four senators are said to have made trades, but two in particular are facing a lot of criticism. The first is Senator Richard Burr. ProPublica reports on February 13, he sold between $628,000 to $1.7 million worth of stock in 33 separate transactions. He is the chairman of the Senate Intel Committee, and he was getting daily briefings about the coronavirus at that time, according to Reuters.

So there are a lot of questions about why he made those trades. In a new statement this morning, he acknowledged-- he seemed to acknowledge-- that the virus was impacting his decisions when he was making these transactions. He said that he relied on public news reports. So he's saying he was not using the classified information that he was getting about this, but I think there is going to be a lot of question about how the chair of the Intel Committee separated the public news reports from the classified information that he was getting in these briefings. He has asked the Senate Ethics Committee to look into that. We did reach out to the Senate's Ethics Committee. We have not heard back on the status of that investigation.

The second senator who is facing a lot of criticism this morning is Senator Kelly Loeffler. She is the newest member of the Senate, and the Daily Beast found that the very day there was an all senators private briefing on the coronavirus, she made her first stock sale of the time in hers-- of her time in the Senate. So this is the first one. She also went on to sell seven figures worth of stock. She made two purchases, and one of those purchases was a tech company that deals in teleconferencing software. So a company that could perform well as all of these people are working from home. Loeffler says this is a baseless attack. On Twitter, she has said that she didn't know anything about these investment decisions. She is not involved. Third party advisors told her later about the decisions they made.