Two weeks after calling on Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) to resign if he couldn’t explain his suspicious stock dumps, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) must leave office if it is revealed she knew in advance about stock trades her financial advisers made.
Last month, after news broke that Burr dumped up to $1.7 million in stocks—including shares in the hotel and resort industry—after Senate briefings on the new coronavirus, The Daily Beast reported that Loeffler made up to $3 million of stock transactions after attending a senators-only meeting on the disease.
All but two of the 29 transactions Loeffler and her husband made between late January and mid-February—before the stock market began tanking—were sales. One of Loeffler’s two purchases was in a tech company that offers teleworking software, which saw a bump in price as more and more workers shifted to working from home.
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At the end of his Thursday night program, Carlson noted that he had Loeffler on to defend herself right after the Beast’s story came out, adding that she denied any wrongdoing and insisted that all the trades were made by her advisers without her prior knowledge.
“Now new congressional disclosures show that she sold far more stock than we initially knew,” the Fox host said. “Between February 26 and March 11, Loeffler and her husband dumped almost $19 million of stock in Intercontinental Exchange, the company her husband runs.”
Pointing out that during that same period the couple sold roughly $1 million in shares of several retailers, Carlson added that they then went and bought stock in DuPont, a company that makes antiviral protective gear.
“So did she know any of this was happening?” Carlson asked. “We don’t know the answer to that. We do know that on March 10, after almost all these trades were done, she went on Twitter to assure constituents that everything was fine.”
“So again, we don’t know the truth,” the Fox News host continued. “But if she knew about these trades and still issued that little PSA we showed you, she should leave office. She claims she only learned about the trades after they happen. She denies insider trading, and good. Then she should welcome a federal investigation into all of this.”
