So we have talked about allegations that Senator Richard Burr did something wrong when he dumped stocks after receiving Intelligence Committee briefings about the coronavirus in February. There was a factual dispute about what secret information Burr did or did not receive in those briefings, and about whether or not he traded based on it, but he surely didn’t get any secret information from the companies whose stocks he sold. If he got secret information, it was secret U.S. government intelligence about the progress of the coronavirus abroad. Which could have been material to those companies—and in fact the stocks he sold went down after he sold them—but wasn’t exactly information about those companies. It wasn’t a matter of inside information; it was a matter of outside information that affected the companies’ stock prices.
Source: Dystopian Future Securities Fraud – Bloomberg
