Senators deny they’re corrupt after dumping stocks before coronavirus crash

What a coinkeydink!

Four senators are scrambling to explain why they sold stocks after nonpublic briefings in January on the threat of the coronavirus.

Facing calls for his resignation for selling as much as $1.72 million in stocks weeks before the market crashed, the Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) asked congressional investigators to probe whether his actions amounted to insider trading.

Burr, an apparent no-show at a Friday lunch for Senate Republicans, sat in regular confidential briefings about the coronavirus and sold off his stocks in companies that later would be slammed in the market sell-of as he publicly downplayed the risk of the outbreak.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) sold as much as $3.1 million worth of stock from Jan. 24 — the day she attended a private briefing for senators on COVID-19. Loeffler — whose husband is chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange — also reportedly bought shares in the tech firm Oracle and Citrix, which provides teleworking software.

“There is no corruption. This is called transparency,” Loeffler told The Post on Friday afternoon as she marched toward an elevator bank in the Russell Senate Office Building.

On Twitter, Loeffler wrote: “This is a ridiculous & baseless attack. I don’t make investment decisions for my portfolio. Investment decisions are made by multiple third-party advisors without my or my husband’s knowledge or involvement.”

Loeffler told reporters on Capitol Hill that “I’m happy to answer any questions.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, sold $500,001 to $1 million worth of stock in a company called Allogene Therapeutics on Jan. 31, less than a month before panic about the virus caused markets to plunge, Senate records show. Her husband sold $1,000,001 to $5 million worth of Allogene shares on Feb. 18, according to financial disclosures. Spokesman Tom Mentzer said her assets are in a “blind trust” and that she “has no involvement in any of her husband’s financial decisions.”

Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who dumped as much as $400,000 worth of stock on Jan. 27, told reporters Friday that he stood falsely accused. He sold shares in five different companies including Apple, PayPal and Brookfield Asset Management, according to a disclosure report.

“There are a lot of people who want to make it sound dishonest,” Inhofe complained.

Inhofe said he, like Feinstein, did not attend the Jan. 24 private briefing for senators. He added that he had instructed stock brokers to sell all of his stocks shortly after he became chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2018.

“This is hard to understand for a lot of people, but when you chair a major committee, and I chair the Senate Armed Services Committee, people are always looking to see if you have a conflict of interest if you own stock of different companies, so to take a precaution, back when I became chairman of that committee, and that was a year and three months ago, I took the initiative to call the stock brokers and tell them to sell, instructed them to sell all stocks so I was completely out of stocks. And they started doing it at that time to take that precaution,” Inhofe said.

Asked to explain why it took more than a year for the sales to take effect, Inhofe said: “When you’re talking about a large number of stocks, 60 percent of them are already sold. That’s pretty remarkable to do that in a year.”

Many other senators kept their distance from the public furore, giving vague statements of concern or professions of ignorance about the details.

But Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), offered a robust defense of his peers, rattling off their various explanations.

“I wouldn’t use the word corruption at all,” Graham said.