US Senator Richard Burr 'dumped stocks worth $1.6m despite reassuring public about coronavirus'

The Republican head of the Senate Intelligence Committee dumped stocks and warned donors of a looming disaster in February even as the White House played down the coronavirus threat, United States media has reported.

Senator Richard Burr, who receives almost daily briefings from the US intelligence community on threats to the country, himself wrote on the Fox News website on February 7 that the US government was “better prepared than ever” for Covid-19, assuring Americans that they were well protected.

The reports will likely add fuel to accusations that President Donald Trump and the US leadership knew of the serious threat but delayed action that could have curbed the spread of infections. The US has more than 14,000 cases and 205 deaths.

As Mr Trump repeatedly said the virus would not hit the US hard, on February 13 Mr Burr and his wife suddenly sold off at least $582,000 (about £500,130) and as much as $1.6 million in stocks, according to ProPublica, who cited financial filings.

And two weeks after that, on the same day that Mr Trump was telling the public that the 15 cases reported could be the US peak, the North Carolina senator told a private gathering of wealthy donors that coronavirus was a threat like the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed tens of millions, according to National Public Radio.

NPR obtained a recording in which Mr Burr told the donors that they should curtail their travel, 15 days before Mr Trump shocked the country with a ban on arrivals from Europe.

“There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” he said on the recording.

“It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”

As the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Mr Burr receives much of the same daily reporting on threats to the country that the White House gets, and so he would have been aware of the government’s internal predictions.

On February 26, the day before Mr Burr met with donors, Mr Trump told the American public: “We’re going very substantially down, not up” in the number of infected.

The next day, the president declared: “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Mr Burr, a Republican veteran of the Senate who is retiring in January, defended his actions, and called the NPR article “a tabloid-style hit piece” that “knowingly and irresponsibly misrepresented” his speech to the donors.

“The message I shared with my constituents is the one public health officials urged all of us to heed as (the) coronavirus spread increased: be prepared.”

The North Carolina senator was not the only lawmaker to sell of stocks just before the steep decline due to the global pandemic. Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a new senator who is up for re-election this year, sold off hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock in late January, as senators began to get briefings on the virus, also according to Senate records.

In the weeks that followed, Ms Loeffler urged her constituents to have faith in the Trump administration’s efforts to prepare the nation.

“@realDonaldTrump & his administration are doing a great job working to keep Americans healthy & safe,” Loeffler tweeted Feb. 27.

The Daily Beast first reported that Loeffler dropped the stock in late January. The senator is married to Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange.

She later tweeted that it was a “baseless” attack and that many decisions were made by third party advisers.