Burr's alleged conflicts extend beyond his coronavirus-related stock trades - POLITICO

By MAGGIE SEVERNS05/15/2020 09:13 PM EDTLink CopiedThe insider trading investigation stemming from Sen. Richard Burr’s sale of stocks ahead of the coronavirus pandemic highlights the North Carolina Republican’s long record of investing in companies with business before his committees, according to a POLITICO review of eight years of his trades.While Burr sat on committees focused on health care, taxes and trade, he and his wife bought and sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in an array of health care companies, banks and corporations with business overseas. Who knows, people could say you’re gaming an index fund,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told POLITICO this week.In 2017, Burr traded stock in two companies that make medical devices, Zimmer Biomet and Philips, while introducing bills to repeal the medical device tax and working to repeal Obamacare.He invested in financial institutions including the Bank of New York Mellon and U.S. Bank, which are regulated by the Senate Finance Committee, on which he sits.As the finance committee debated the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Burr held stock in multinational conglomerate Kimberly-Clark, owner of Kleenex, which owns brands in Mexico.As tensions rose in 2019 with China, he picked up stock in 3M, another multinational whose purchases and sales with China were affected by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which also fall under the finance committee's jurisdiction.Burr’s investments in health care have repeatedly overlapped with the work of the Senate HELP Committee, on which he also sits. Specifically, I closely followed CNBC’s daily health and science reporting out of its Asia bureaus at the time,” Burr said in a statement on March 20.But Burr has long held stocks in companies that have business before his committees, creating the possibility that he could learn nonpublic information that has to do with his stock portfolio.While Congress has barred most executive branch employees from holding stocks that pose a similar conflict of interest with their work, Congress has not put similar limits on itself, said Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer and candidate for the Senate.“It would be a crime for almost anyone in the executive branch to have medical device stock and weigh in on the medical device tax,” Painter said.The practice is not uncommon in the House and Senate.