Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA)Wow. Turns out a second Republican senator sold off millions in stock holdings after receiving high-level intelligence on the coronavirus.
From The Daily Beast:
The Senate’s newest member sold off seven figures worth of stock holdings in the days and weeks after a private, all-senators meeting on the novel coronavirus that subsequently hammered U.S. equities.
Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) reported the first sale of stock jointly owned by her and her husband on Jan. 24, the very day that her committee, the Senate Health Committee, hosted a private, all-senators briefing from administration officials, including the CDC director and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institutes of Health of the United States, on the coronavirus.
“Appreciate today’s briefing from the President’s top health officials on the novel coronavirus outbreak,” she tweeted about the briefing at the time.
That first transaction was a sale of stock in the company Resideo Technologies worth between $50,001 and $100,000. The company’s stock price has fallen by more than half since then, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average overall has shed approximately 10,000 points, dropping about a third of its value.
Daily Beast reporter Sam Stein notes Loeffler had not made a single stock transaction during the three weeks she served in office prior to this one. This was her first. The day she got the coronavirus briefing.
Earlier today I reported that Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) sold more than $1.5 million in stock after being briefed on the impending coronavirus crisis while publicly telling the public everything would be fine.
Note – Loeffler is married to Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, and the chairman and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, which is NYSE’s parent company.
Whether your last name is Burr or Loeffler, and are an R or D, if your immediate reaction upon learning of an impending pandemic, is to take advantage of your privilege to put yourself in a better position than other Americans, you’re no public servant. You’re self-serving jerk.
— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) March 20, 2020
To be clear, Sen Loeffler not only dumped stock, illegally using non-public information (allegedly), she used the proceeds to buys stock in a TELEWORKING SOFTWARE company, profiting off the #COVID19-induced collapse of the economy. https://t.co/H2EUBSUDL6
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) March 20, 2020
To be clear, Sen Loeffler not only dumped stock, illegally using non-public information (allegedly), she used the proceeds to buys stock in a TELEWORKING SOFTWARE company, profiting off the #COVID19-induced collapse of the economy. https://t.co/H2EUBSUDL6
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) March 20, 2020