Sen. Loeffler to make investment changes after criticism over her stock selloff

Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler announced Wednesday that she and her husband will make changes to their investments following revelations that she and three other senators sold millions of dollars worth of stock as Congress was being apprised on the growing coronavirus outbreak.

Loeffler and her husband Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange and the Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, came under scrutiny for stock trades conducted after Sen. Loeffler attended a coronavirus briefing on Jan. 24. 

The Republican lawmaker says accusations that she sold stocks based on privileged information are nothing more than "baseless attacks."

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Loeffler, who noted that she donates her congressional salary to charities, pushed back against the allegations of wrongdoing, saying that she and her husband had managed accounts and did not intervene in the handling of the accounts.

"Although Senate ethics rules don’t require it, my husband and I are liquidating our holdings in managed accounts and moving into exchange-traded funds and mutual funds," she wrote.

"In its hunger to place blame, the media fixated on a fantasy of improper congressional trading, stemming from a Jan. 24 briefing I and other senators attended with health officials," she wrote. "But based on contemporaneous reporting and public statements by the officials who provided the briefing, there was no material or nonpublic information discussed. All we did was meet public-health leaders and ask them questions about the emerging virus."

Markets have fallen sharply under the weight of the coronavirus pandemic that has choked out much of the nation's previously vibrant economy.

The three other senators who sold stocks as the virus threatened the global economy were Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.)