FBI agents have seized the cell phone of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a ranking Republican from North Carolina, as part of an investigation into his stock sales, a U.S. official tells CBS News.
Burr and his wife sold between $600,000 and $1.7 million in stocks over 30 transactions from late January through mid-February, before the stock market plunged and as warnings about a coronavirus pandemic grew more severe.
“We’ll decline to comment,” Burr communications director Caitlin Carroll said late Wednesday. The Los Angeles Times first reported the seizure of Burr’s phone.
Several of the stocks sold were in companies that own hotels, an industry that has been decimated by the coronavirus. The bulk of Burr’s stock sales took place on February 13, just before he made a speech predicting extreme measures would have to be taken to check the spread of the virus, including closing schools and cutting company travel, according to audio obtained by National Public Radio.
At the time, President Trump was suggesting there was little to fear from the virus — there were under 50 cases in the U.S., and he was speculating that the heat in April might just “kill this kind of virus.”
