WASHINGTON -- Republican Sen. Richard Burr temporarily stepped aside as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday after the FBI served a search warrant for his cellphone as part of an investigation into a sale of stocks tied to the coronavirus pandemic.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced the move, saying he and Burr had agreed that it was in the committee's best interests.
Burr told reporters at the Capitol that he thought it was "the right thing to do."
"This is a distraction to the hard work of the committee and the members, and I think that the security of the country is too important to have a distraction," Burr said.
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Burr, from North Carolina, said he would serve out the remainder of his term, which ends in 2023. He is not running for reelection.
Burr was not the only lawmaker whose stock sales around the same time made headlines.
Republican Kelly Loeffler, a new senator from Georgia up for reelection this year, sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock in late January and February. She subsequently said that she would liquidate her stock portfolio and move the money to investment funds.
A spokesman for Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said Thursday that she was "asked some basic questions by law enforcement about her husband's stock transactions," which she answered. There has been no follow-up, said the spokesman, Tom Mentzer.
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Disclosure records show Feinstein and her husband sold $1.5 million to $6 million worth of stock between Jan. 31 and Feb. 18.
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., also drew public scrutiny for selling stocks around the same time.
FBI officials showed up at Burr's home with the warrant on Wednesday, two people familiar with the investigation said, marking an escalation into the Justice Department's investigation into whether Burr exploited advance information when he unloaded as much as $1.7 million in stocks in the days before the coronavirus caused markets to plummet. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation.
The search warrant was served on a lawyer for Burr, and FBI agents went to the senator's home in the Washington area to take the cellphone, a senior Justice Department official said. The decision to obtain the warrant, which must be authorized by a judge, was approved at the highest levels of the department, the official said.
Investigators obtained a search warrant to examine data in the senator's cloud storage for his iPhone, according to a person familiar with the case. The Burr search warrants were first reported Wednesday by the Los Angeles Times.
The Justice Department declined to comment. Burr's attorney did not respond to phone and email messages but said in a statement last month that the law is clear that any senator can participate in stock market trading based on public information "as Sen. Burr did." The attorney, Alice Fisher, had said that Burr welcomed a review of the stock sales, "which will establish that his actions were appropriate."
Burr has denied wrongdoing but has requested an ethics review of the stock sales.
"Oh, wow," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, upon learning that Burr had temporarily stepped aside. "I don't know what to say. I truly didn't know about it. He's been an excellent chairman of the committee."
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, another Republican on the intelligence panel, said he respects Burr's decision, adding that "he's entitled to a presumption of innocence just like anybody else."
Senate records show that Burr and his wife sold between roughly $600,000 and $1.7 million in more than 30 transactions in late January and mid-February, just before the market began to nose-dive and government health officials began to sound alarms about the virus.
Burr has acknowledged selling the stocks because of the coronavirus but said he relied "solely on public news reports," specifically CNBC's daily health and science reporting out of Asia, to make the financial decisions.
Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he believed the lawmaker's explanation that his trades were based on media reports.
"I don't believe he did anything criminally wrong, maybe used poor judgment, I guess, but I know Richard and he's the one guy I can tell you who actually does watch CNBC Hong Kong," said Graham.
Senators did receive a private briefing on the virus on Jan. 24, which was public knowledge. A separate briefing was held Feb. 12 by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, of which Burr is a member. It's unclear if he attended either session.
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Tucker, Michael Balsamo, Mary Clare Jalonick, Lisa Mascaro and Colleen Long of The Associated Press; and by Devlin Barrett, Seung Min Kim, Katie Shepherd, Matt Zapotosky and Paul Kane of The Washington Post.
A Section on 05/15/2020