Kelly Loeffler to Liquidate Stock Amid Coronavirus Trading Uproar

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) pledged on Wednesday to liquidate her individual stock holdings amid a firestorm over trades that coincided with non-public Senate briefings on the novel coronavirus. “Although Senate ethics rules don’t require it, my husband and I are liquidating our holdings in managed accounts and moving into exchange-traded funds and mutual funds,” Loeffler wrote in a Wall Street Journal column on Wednesday. “I will report these exiting transactions in the periodic transaction report I file later this month.” The dramatic move came weeks after The Daily Beast revealed that Loeffler and her husband, New York Stock Exchange chief executive Jeff Sprecher, had dumped between $1.2 million and $3.1 million in stock in the immediate aftermath of a closed-door coronavirus briefing in late January. Loeffler also purchased stock in Citrix, which sells the popular teleworking software GoToMeeting. She was later revealed to have bought stock in an online travel booking site in February, only to sell it four days later—immediately before the Trump administration announced a ban on flights from Europe. In her WSJ column on Wednesday, Loeffler reiterated her defense that all of her stock trades were handled by a third-party broker with whom she had no communication about the transactions. “I have never used any confidential information I received while performing my Senate duties as a means of making a private profit. Nor has anyone in my family,” she wrote.