What’s going on with the Sen. Burr investigation?

In May, FBI agents served a search warrant on Republican North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, seizing his cellphone as part of a look into his flurry of stock sales in February, just before the pandemic sent the market into a tailspin.

What did they find? Six months later, no word. The FBI declines to comment. So does Burr’s office.

Burr, who has said he will not seek re-election when his third Senate term ends in 2022, is now living in a political and legal limbo that seems to be dragging on for an inordinately long time.

On the surface, this would seem a straightforward case. Check Burr’s phone and trading records. Check what he heard in briefings from health and intelligence officials. And see if he sold as much as $1.7 million in stock on Feb. 13 based on information unavailable to the public.

In most insider-trading cases, the stock sale or purchase is based on advance knowledge about a merger, the outcome of a drug trial or a shakeup among corporate executives. In Burr’s case, the spreading coronavirus was public knowledge. The issue is whether the senator acted based on government briefings about the severity of the pandemic – a severity that would soon cause the market to dive. The STOCK Act passed in 2012 prohibits lawmakers from selling stock under such circumstances.

Burr said he made the sales based on information he gained through the media, but he nonetheless stepped down as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and invited the Senate Ethics Committee to review his actions.

Thomas Lee Hazen, a UNC law professor and an expert on securities law, said Burr’s case would be hard to prosecute.

“I think this is going to be a very uphill battle to show that the information that he had was significantly different than what the public knew,” Hazen said. “Any super-cautious investor would have sold at that time anyway.”

The government certainly acted quickly when the same concerns were raised about other senators’ stock sales just prior to the pandemic-induced decline in the market. Trades by Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., and the husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., were quickly cleared as transactions in which the senators did not play a direct role.

Hazen said of Burr’s sales, “Unless and until some charges are brought, it’s fair to assume that there is nothing there.”

Or there is more. In May, Politico reported that Burr has a history of skirting an ethical line on stock trades and sometimes “owned stock in companies whose specific industries he advanced through legislation.”

Or this could be a case of political payback. Certainly, as Politico also has reported, President Trump and his circle might welcome the humiliation of the Republican senator who didn’t offer Trump absolute deference. Burr’s Intelligence Committee contradicted the president’s claim that the Russians did not meddle in the 2016 election on his behalf. And Burr provoked criticism from Republicans when his committee subpoenaed Donald Trump Jr. to testify.

Burr’s silence on the investigation into his stock sales may be his best approach legally, but it’s time for the Justice Department and the Senate Ethics Committee to shed light on the legal status of North Carolina’s senior senator.

This story was originally published November 16, 2020 at 12:00 AM with the headline "What’s going on with the Sen. Burr investigation?."