WASHINGTON - Senator Richard Burr sold hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of stock in major companies last month as President Donald Trump and others in his party were still playing down the threat presented by the coronavirus outbreak and before the stock market's precipitous plunge.
The gathering, which drew fewer than 100 people, included representatives from the North Carolina governor's office, as well as staff members from other congressional offices in the state. Burr has long pushed for the United States to better prepare for the threat presented by pandemics, including sponsoring legislation that Congress passed in 2006 called the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act.
He argued that the report made him look duplicitous for sharing information at a publicly advertised event that was consistent with the message members of the Trump administration were then trying to promulgate. He did not address his stock sales. Congress began requiring its members to disclose their stock sales in 2012, when it passed a law called Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, which was intended to prevent lawmakers from using inside information to profit. The forms do not require lawmakers to record their actual earnings from those sales, just a range of the value of each transaction.