Securities attorney and pundit Dan McLaughlin opines:
Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue appear to have been unfairly targeted by national and Atlanta media. Dianne Feinstein and Jim Inhofe likewise have reasonable explanations for their reported stock sales, as does Vermont representative Peter Welch. Senator Richard Burr, however, has some serious questions to answer, and has yet to offer a particularly persuasive defense. ...
Congress in 2012 passed the STOCK Act, clarifying that when members of Congress receive confidential nonpublic information that could affect the price of a stock, they are treated as if they were company insiders. That’s important, because insider-trading laws generally only ban people from trading on company secrets if they work for the company or have a relationship that causes them to owe a legal duty to it. While the SEC is typically hesitant to admit it, a random bystander on the street who accidentally overhears a CEO spilling inside information and buys or sells stock as a result is probably not breaking the law. Those in Congress, however, frequently learn market-moving information because they work in government, rather than the companies that information pertains to. The STOCK Act aimed to close that perceived loophole by declaring that members of Congress have their own duty not to trade on what they learn. ...
A key question in insider-trading cases is proving that the person who bought or sold stock actually knew about the inside information, and traded on that basis. Where the insider-trading charge breaks down here is that all of the senators other than Burr say that their stock trades were made by their financial advisers without their input.
It's a good read.
