It is stomach-churning that the first thoughts these Senators had to a dire & classified #COVID briefing was how to profit off this crisis.
They didn't mobilize to help families, or prep response. They dumped stock.
BEIJING, March. 20 (Xinhua) -- Several U.S. senators dumped stocks after a closed-door meeting on coronavirus and avoided one of the greatest sell-offs in history just in time, U.S. media reports.
Journalists and people on social media raised questions after sales disclosure showed some senators' narrow escape from last week's stock market collapse.
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 Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 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 valued at 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,
It was the first of 29 stock transactions that Loeffler and her husband made through mid-February, all but two of which were sales, the Daily Beast reported.
One of Loeffler's two purchases was stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in Citrix, a technology company that offers teleworking software and which has seen a small bump in its stock price since Loeffler bought in as a result of coronavirus-induced market turmoil.
In response to questions on her transactions, Loeffler tweeted: "This is a ridiculous and baseless attack. I do not make investment decisions for my portfolio. Investment decisions are made by multiple third-party advisors without my or my husband's knowledge or involvement."
Richard Burr, chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, sold off between 628,000 to 1.72 million U.S. dollars worth of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions, ProPublica reported Thursday.
A week after Burr's sales, the stock market began a sharp decline and has lost about 30% since.
On Thursday, Burr came under fire after NPR obtained a secret recording from Feb. 27, in which the lawmaker gave a VIP group at an exclusive social club a much more dire preview of the economic impact of the coronavirus than what he had told the public, according to the report.
Accused senators include Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler, Dianne Feinstein, Ron Johnson and Jim Inhofe.
U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned the senators' "stomach-churning" acts. "They didn't mobilize to help families, or prep response. They dumped stock," she tweeted, earning more than 140,000 thumb-ups from twitter users.■