Senator Dianne Feinstein Is Talking to the FBI About That Suspicious Stock Dump

Nearly two months after it came to light that a number of U.S. senators dumped stock around the time of a Senate Health Committee briefing on covid-19 in January, the New York Post reports that Senator Dianne Feinstein has been contacted by the FBI about the stock transactions in question.

According to a spokesperson for Feinstein, the senator was first contacted by the FBI about this matter last month and has provided written answers to their questions. According to Feinstein’s spokesperson, the offices of Senators Kelly Loeffler and James Inhofe—two of the other representatives who dumped their stock in January and February—were also contacted by the FBI. And that isn’t shocking since, on Thursday, the FBI served a search warrant to Senator Richard Burr as part of their investigation into his stock dealings. In early February, Burr sold off as much as $1.72 million of his stock portfolio, all while he was receiving daily intelligence briefings on the progress of coronavirus as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

According to the Feinstein spokesperson, the FBI asked the senator questions about her husband’s stock transactions during January and February.

“Senator Feinstein was asked some basic questions by law enforcement about her husband’s stock transactions, as I think all offices in the initial story were,” Mentzer said.

“She was happy to voluntarily answer those questions to set the record straight and provided additional documents to show she had no involvement in her husband’s transactions. There have been no follow-up actions on this issue,” Mentzer said.

The trades in question took place on February 18, when Feinstein’s husband sold $1,000,001 to $5 million worth of shares in a biotechnology company called Allogene Therapeutics. However, originally the senator herself was also under scrutiny for her own transactions. According to Senate records, Feinstein sold $500,001 to $1 million worth of stock in Allogene Therapeutics herself a few weeks before her husband, on January 31.

I know that rich people don’t necessarily check their bank accounts and investment portfolios every day, but it certainly seems…. questionable to decide to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in one day, less than a week after receiving information about an upcoming pandemic. Eyebrow-raising indeed.