Insiders Profited From Advanced Knowledge of Donald Trump (Tariff, Covid19, Etc.) Announcements

Numerous Senators In The Trump Adminstration Dumped Millions In Stock Weeks Before Coronavirus Pandemic Hit US!!! Insiders Profited From Advanced Knowledge of Donald Trump (Tariff, Covid19, Etc.) Announcements

Burr, Senate Colleagues Sold Stock After Coronavirus Briefings

Multiple members of Congress and spouses made sales that saved them from losses before markets slid.

Weeks before the new coronavirus pandemic sent the stock market plummeting, several members of Congress, their spouses and investment advisers each sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock after lawmakers attended sensitive, closed-door briefings about the threat of the disease.

Some of the well-timed sales saved the senators and their spouses as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential losses, a Wall Street Journal analysis of the trades shows.

Sen. Richard Burr, a top Republican from North Carolina who sits on two committees that received detailed briefings on the growing epidemic, reported in disclosure reports that he and his wife on Feb. 13 sold shares of companies worth as much as $1.7 million.

The Journal analysis shows that the shares sold by the Burrs were worth—at minimum—$250,000 less at the close of trading on March 19 than they were when the senator and his wife sold them. Mr. Burr said in a statement that he relied upon “public news reports to guide my decisions regarding the sale of stocks.”

Mr. Burr quickly drew criticism after his stock sales were reported Thursday evening by ProPublica and the Center for Responsive Politics. Fox News host Tucker Carlson called for Mr. Burr to resign, as did a handful of Democratic House members and the North Carolina Democratic Party.

On Friday morning, Mr. Burr said he “understands the assumption that many could make in hindsight” and asked the Senate Ethics Committee chairman “to open a complete review of the matter with full transparency.”

While some market analysts were warning at the time of the potential damage the emerging coronavirus could cause to the stock market, the sales also came at a time when President Trump and some Republican politicians were playing down the potential harm from the epidemic.

Other senators who were actively trading before the spreading infectious disease caused the markets to fall were Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue of Georgia, and James Inhofe of Oklahoma. The husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, also sold stock before the market downturn.

Ms. Loeffler and Ms. Feinstein, who are both married to investment professionals, said they had been unaware of the trades because they are handled by advisers. Mr. Perdue said his portfolio is managed by an investment adviser who regularly makes dozens of trades and was buying as well as selling shares of companies at the time. Mr. Inhofe in a statement said he also has an investment adviser and doesn’t manage trades.

Mr. Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has been receiving frequent briefings on the spread of Covid-19 since it emerged in China, made 33 stock trades on Feb. 13 worth between $628,000 and $1.7 million, according to the filings. Congressional rules require that trades be reported in ranges, not precise figures.

Mr. Burr, who is regarded as the Senate’s leading authority on pandemics as the author of the 2006 Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, is also on the Senate health committee, which was briefed on the coronavirus on Jan. 24.

Three of Mr. Burr’s sales were in hotel company stocks—Park Hotels and Resorts Inc., Wyndham Hotels & Resorts Inc. and Extended Stay America Inc. —which have seen their value drop 74%, 63% and 50%, respectively, since Mr. Burr made the sales.

Mr. Burr and his wife also sold between $96,000 and $265,000 in stock between Jan. 31 and Feb. 4, the filings show, including additional shares of Extended Stay.

In an opinion piece published on Fox News online, Mr. Burr said, “Thankfully, the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus.”

Behind closed doors, in a meeting with a small group of constituents in Washington, Mr. Burr warned them to prepare for dire economic effects of the coronavirus, according to a recording obtained by NPR. On Twitter, Mr. Burr called that report a “tabloid-style hit piece.”

On Friday, Mr. Burr explained his trades were motivated by news reports. “Specifically, I closely followed CNBC’s daily health and science reporting out of its Asia bureaus at the time,” he said.

Sales were also reported by two other members of the Intelligence Committee, Mr. Inhofe and Ms. Feinstein.

Between Jan. 27 and Feb. 20, Mr. Inhofe sold between $230,000 and $500,000 of stock in several companies, including Brookfield Asset Management, a real-estate company.

Mr. Inhofe in a statement said that his investment adviser has been moving him out of stocks and into mutual funds after he took the chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee in December 2018 “to avoid any appearance of controversy.

Richard Blum, the husband of Ms. Feinstein and a professional investment manager, sold shares of Allogene Therapeutics Inc., a biotech company, on Jan. 31 and Feb. 18 in amounts between $1.5 million and $6 million.

Ms. Feinstein’s spokesman said the senator wasn’t involved in the sales. “All of Senator Feinstein’s assets are in a blind trust, as they have been since she came to the Senate. She has no involvement in any of her husband’s financial decisions,” her spokesman, Tom Mentzer, said in an email.

Matthew Sanderson, a political ethics attorney for Caplin & Drysdale, said he advises his congressional clients either to invest in mutual funds and 401(k)s, or turn investments over to an adviser with a regime to separate the lawmaker for the decision-making.

Mr. Burr’s statement that he acted based upon what he heard from the news media, and not what he learned as a committee chairman, could land him in hot water, Mr. Sanderson said. “That’s pretty weak tea, as for defenses,” Mr. Sanderson said. “That really doesn’t pass muster.”

In 2012, President Obama signed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act to outlaw members of Congress and other government employees from engaging in insider trading based on information learned through their jobs.

The public interest group Common Cause filed complaints asking the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate the trades of Sens. Burr, Feinstein, Loeffler and Inhofe for possible violations of the law. A Common Cause spokesman said the group’s lawyers had just learned of Mr. Perdue’s trades and were considering adding him to the complaint.

Ms. Loeffler also sits on the Senate’s health committee, which had a closed-door briefing on Jan. 24 about the virus with presentations from the leading U.S. public-health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious-diseases specialist in government.

That day, Ms. Loeffler reported, she and her husband began making more than two dozen transactions, primarily selling millions of dollars in companies, including retailers AutoZone Inc. and Ross Stores Inc. They sold between $1.28 million and $3.1 million in stock.

By selling stock when they did, Ms. Loeffler and her husband avoided at least $480,000 in losses as of market close on March 19. The couple also purchased two stocks in February, one of which rose in value despite the market crash. Citrix Systems Inc., which makes remote computing software, rose nearly 3% value since the couple bought shares on Feb. 14.

Meanwhile, Mr. Inhofe and Mr. Perdue traded smaller amounts and avoided at least $63,000 in losses and $43,000 in losses, respectively, since late January. The stocks Mr. Perdue purchased fell similarly in value.

Ms. Loeffler said neither she nor her husband make her own day-to-day decisions on purchases and sales. She said didn’t learn about these transactions until three weeks after they were made. “This is a ridiculous & baseless attack,” Ms. Loeffler said on Twitter.

Ms. Loeffler’s husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, is the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.

Ms. Loeffler was appointed to her seat in December after Sen. Johnny Isakson resigned for health reasons and is locked in a fierce intraparty battle for a Senate seat in Georgia. Her primary rival, Rep. Doug Collins, criticized the senator. “It’s a sad situation,” Mr. Collins said.

The stock sales of Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Sprecher were reported earlier by the Daily Beast.

“There Is Definite Hanky-Panky Going On”: The Fantastically Profitable Mystery Of The Trump Chaos Trades. Insiders Profiting From Advanced Knowledge of Donald Trump Announcements

The president’s talk can move markets—and it’s made some futures traders billions. Did they know what he was going to say before he said it?

In the last 10 minutes of trading at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Friday, September 13, someone got very lucky. That’s when he or she, or a group of people, sold short 120,000 “S&P e-minis”—electronically traded futures contracts linked to the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index—when the index was trading around 3010. The time was 3:50 p.m. in New York; it was nearing midnight in Tehran. A few hours later, drones attacked a large swath of Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure, choking off production in the country and sending oil prices soaring. By the time the CME next opened, for pretrading on Sunday night, the S&P index had fallen 30 points, giving that very fortunate trader, or traders, a quick $180 million profit.

It was not an isolated occurrence. Three days earlier, in the last 10 minutes of trading, someone bought 82,000 S&P e-minis when the index was trading at 2969. That was nearly 4 a.m. on September 11 in Beijing, where a few hours later, the Chinese government announced that it would lift tariffs on a range of American-made products. As has been the typical reaction in the U.S. stock markets as the trade war with China chugs on without any perceptible logic, when the news about a potential resolution of it seems positive, stock markets go up, and when the news about the trade war appears negative, they go down.

The news was viewed positively. The S&P index moved swiftly on September 11 to 2996, up nearly 30 points. That same day, President Donald Trump said he would postpone tariffs on some Chinese goods, and the S&P index moved to 3016, or up 47 points since the fortunate person bought the 82,000 e-minis just before the market closed on September 10. Since a one-point movement, up or down, in an e-mini contract is worth $50, a 47-point movement up in a day was worth $2,350 per contract. If you were the lucky one who bought the 82,000 e-mini contracts, well, then you were sitting on a one-day profit of roughly $190 million.

A week earlier, three minutes before the CME closed on September 3, someone bought 55,000 e-mini contracts, with the index at about 2906. At around 9 p.m. in New York—9 a.m. in Hong Kong—the market started moving and kept rallying for the next six hours or so, reaching 2936. Around 2 p.m. in Hong Kong—2 a.m. in New York—Carrie Lam, the Hong Kong leader, announced that she would be withdrawing the controversial extradition bill that had been roiling the city in protest for months. Whoever bought those e-mini contracts a few hours earlier made a killing: a cool $82.5 million profit.

But these wins were peanuts compared to the money made by a trader, or group of traders, who bought 420,000 September e-minis in the last 30 minutes of trading on June 28. That was some 40% of the day’s trading volume in September e-minis—making it a trade that could not easily be ignored. By then, President Trump was already in Osaka, Japan—14 hours ahead of Chicago—and on his way to a roughly hour-long meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping as part of the G20 summit. On Saturday in Osaka, after the market had closed in Chicago, Trump emerged from his meeting with Xi and announced that the intermittent trade talks were “back on track.” The following week was a good one in the stock market, thanks to the Trump announcement. On Thursday, June 27, the S&P 500 index stood at about 2915; a week or so later, it was just below 3000, a gain of 84 points, or $4,200 per e-mini contract. Whoever bought the 420,000 e-minis on June 28 had made a handsome profit of nearly $1.8 billion.

Traders in the Chicago pits have been watching these kinds of wagers with an increasing mixture of shock and awe since the start of the Trump presidency. They are used to rapid fluctuations in the S&P 500 index; volatility is common, of course. But the precision and timing of these trades, and the vast amount of money being made as a result of them, make the traders wonder if all this is on the level. Are the people behind these trades incredibly lucky, or do they have access to information that other people don’t have about, say, Trump’s or Beijing’s latest thinking on the trade war or any other of a number of ways that Trump is able to move the markets through his tweeting or slips of the tongue? Essentially, do they have inside information?

Theoretically, market regulators are supposed to be keeping an eye on big trades such as these, to try to figure out whether they are just happy coincidences or whether there is something more nefarious afoot. And they say they do. But calls to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where the trades takes place, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the equity markets, and to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures contracts, such as e-minis, were answered in different ways. Christopher Carofine, at the SEC, declined to comment. The CFTC did not respond to my inquiries, while a spokeswoman for the CME says the trades in question did not originate from a single source and they were of no concern.

There is no way for another trader, let alone an outsider such as me, to know who is making these trades. But regulators know or can find out. One longtime CME trader who has been watching with disgust says he’s never seen anything quite like these trades, not at least since al-Qaida cashed in before initiating the September 11 attacks. “There is definite hanky-panky going on, to the world’s financial markets’ detriment,” he says. “This is abysmal.”

In the case of Trump, market manipulation also yields political dividends. Perhaps the most obvious example dates to late August, when Trump, desperate to reignite trade talks with China, boasted during the G7 summit that his counterparts in Beijing had come back to the table. “We’ve gotten two calls—very, very good calls,” he told reporters. “They mean business.” The market rose more than 900 points over the next few days. But a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry said he was not aware of any such calls. An editor at the Global Times, the state-controlled newspaper, tweeted that he knew of no calls made in the days leading up to the G7 meeting and that “China won’t cave to US pressure.” Two U.S government officials later told CNN that Trump misspoke and “conflated” comments from China’s Vice Premier Liu He with direct communication from the Chinese. According to CNN, the officials said Trump was “eager to project optimism that might boost markets.”

Indeed, this single Trump lie briefly inflated domestic markets by hundreds of billions of dollars. “What this describes is, quite literally, market manipulation that constitutes criminal violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934,” commented George Conway, the conservative attorney and Trump critic.

Whether Conway is right or wrong is a matter of legal opinion, but given how fishy and coincidental the trading in e-minis seems to be these days, the SEC or CFTC would be doing a great service (and their job) for the American people by investigating who is behind these lucrative trades, and what they knew before they placed them. At the moment, what we’re getting from them is an indifferent shrug.

Updated: 3-30-2020

Justice Department Investigating Lawmakers For Possible Insider Trading

FBI contacted Sen. Burr in inquiry into whether lawmakers traded based on confidential briefings.

The Justice Department is examining whether lawmakers traded ahead of the market turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic based on confidential briefings they received, according to a person familiar with the matter.

As part of that inquiry, the FBI has reached out to Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.), said the person.

Mr. Burr—who sits on two committees that received detailed briefings on the growing epidemic, including one on Jan. 24—sold on Feb. 13 shares of companies worth as much as $1.7 million that he owns with his wife. That saved the couple at least $250,000 in losses based on what those stocks were worth at the close of trading on March 19, the Journal has reported.

The lawmaker has said he based those decisions on public information, including CNBC’s reports out of Asia at the time, and asked the Senate ethics panel to review his trading. An attorney for Mr. Burr, Alice Fisher, said Mr. Burr would cooperate in the Senate review “as well as any other appropriate inquiry.”

“Senator Burr welcomes a thorough review of the facts in this matter, which will establish that his actions were appropriate,” said Ms. Fisher, who ran the Justice Department’s criminal division in the George W. Bush Administration.

Mr. Burr was one of several members of Congress who sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock after lawmakers attended sensitive, closed-door briefings about the threat of the new disease—weeks before the outbreak sent the stock market plummeting.

Other senators who were actively trading before the spreading infectious disease caused the markets to fall were Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue of Georgia, and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the Journal previously reported. The husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, also sold stock before the market downturn.

Congress in 2012 barred its members from trading stocks based on information they pick up in the halls of Capitol Hill, a practice that wasn’t previously banned.

CNN first reported the Justice Department was looking into Mr. Burr’s trading.

Most insider trading cases involve trading based on advanced knowledge about an event affecting a specific company or industry. Mr. Burr’s share sales ranged across industries, including hotels, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and technology stocks.

Mr. Burr, regarded as the Senate’s leading authority on pandemics as the author of the 2006 Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, is on the Senate health and intelligence committees, which were briefed on the coronavirus.

He is one of only three senators who voted against the 2012 legislation banning insider trading by members of Congress; he claimed at the time that it was duplicative, because insider trading was already illegal. However, experts disagreed about whether existing laws barring the practice applied to the lawmakers.

Federal regulators might start here: In the last 10 minutes of trading on Friday, August 23, as the markets were roiling in the face of more bad trade news, someone bought 386,000 September e-minis. Three days later, Trump lied about getting a call from China to restart the trade talks, and the S&P 500 index shot up nearly 80 points. The potential profit on the trade was more than $1.5 billion.

Updated: 5-14-2020

Sen. Burr To Step Aside As Intelligence Panel Chairman During Stock-Trade Probe

Sen. Richard Burr Has Said He Based His Stock-Trading Decisions On Public Information, Including Cnbc’s Reports Out Of Asia At The Time.

Move comes after FBI seized North Carolina Republican’s cellphone as part of investigation.

Sen. Richard Burr plans to step aside as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee during the investigation into stock trades he made shortly before the coronavirus-induced market turmoil, a move announced a day after federal investigators seized his cellphone.

“This has become a distraction to the committee work on a committee that’s really, really important to the national security and a distraction to its members, and I thought this was the best thing to do,” Mr. Burr told reporters.

Mr. Burr said he is cooperating with investigators and has been from the beginning. Asked about the seizure of his phone by the FBI, he said, “It is part of the investigation and everybody ought to let this investigation play out.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said the North Carolina Republican contacted him on Thursday morning to inform him of his decision. “We agreed that this decision would be in the best interests of the committee and will be effective at the end of the day tomorrow,” Mr. McConnell said in a statement.

Mr. Burr will remain on the Intelligence Committee, a person familiar with the matter said.

The FBI seized Mr. Burr’s cellphone late Wednesday as part of a Justice Department investigation into whether he traded stocks based on confidential briefings he received, a person familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Burr relinquished his phone to agents at his Washington-area home Wednesday, the person said. A search warrant for the phone was served on Mr. Burr’s lawyer, a senior Justice Department official said. Investigators also served a search warrant seeking data in Mr. Burr’s iPhone cloud storage, according to the person.

The FBI declined to comment.

The action, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, reflects an intensification of the department’s illicit-trading probe; executing a search warrant on a sitting member of Congress requires review and approval from senior law-enforcement officials and signoff from a judge. The judge’s approval indicates he or she believes there is probable cause to suspect a crime has been committed.

The warrant was approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department, the senior official said.

The lawmaker has said he based those decisions on public information, including CNBC’s reports out of Asia at the time. He also asked the Senate ethics panel to review his trading. An attorney for Mr. Burr, Alice Fisher, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. She previously said Mr. Burr would cooperate in the Senate review “as well as any other appropriate inquiry.”

Updated: 5-27-2020

DOJ Drops Insider Trading Probe Into Three Senators, Still Investigating Burr

The Justice Department has dropped insider-trading investigations into three U.S. senators but remains focused on Senator Richard Burr (R., N.C.), according to multiple reports.

Prosecutors have informed attorneys for Senators Kelly Loeffler (R., Ga.), Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), and Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.) that they were no longer under investigation for selling off millions in stock in January ahead of the coronavirus market dip, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. All three said the trades were made through third-party advisers and that they had no knowledge of them until after the fact.

Loeffler, who has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, said in April that she and her husband Jeffrey Sprecher — chairman of the New York Stock Exchange — would be liquidating their personal stock holdings following public scrutiny.

“Today’s clear exoneration affirms what I’ve said all along: I did nothing wrong,” Loeffler tweeted following the news. “This was a politically-motivated attack promoted by the fake news media and my political opponents. I’m continuing to focus my full attention on results for Georgia.”

The Georgia businesswoman, who was appointed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp in December to fill former Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson’s seat, has fallen in the polls against Representative Doug Collins for November’s special election. An April poll found that GOP Georgia voters preferred Collins to Loeffler by a 62–18 margin.

Burr, who stepped down as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month, had a more direct role in his trades. The trades represented a significant share of his total holdings and were collectively worth between $628,000 and $1.7 million.

Burr has said he “relied solely on public news reports” to ascertain the severity of the coronavirus’s likely impact on the market. But he wrote an opinion article for Fox News days after his sale suggesting that the United States was “better prepared than ever before” to deal with coronavirus.

Two weeks later, he told a small gathering of North Carolina businessmen that the novel virus was “probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic,” according to a recording obtained by NPR.

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