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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
In the wake of reports last month that four US senators sold stocks shortly after a classified briefing on January 24 about the risk posed by the novel coronavirus, Timothy Carambat, a mechanical and software engineer, created a website to make stock sales by every senator more visible.
In an email to The Register, Carambat, who runs a design firm based in Covington, Louisiana, called Industrial Object, explained he was motivated to create Senate Stock Watcher after news broke that Senators Richard Burr (R-NC), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), James Inhofe (R-OK), and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) had dumped stocks before most people in America understood the implications of the outbreak. It is illegal for senators to buy and sell shares using non-public information.
Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been sued for alleged securities fraud, a charge he has denied. It is said he unloaded up to $1.7m in stocks in mid-February, particularly in hotel groups that would be later hit hard by the virus pandemic, all while receiving daily confidential briefings about the impact of the bio-nasty – and reassuring the public everything would be fine.
"As public servants, there are some senators making alarmingly large money movements at what would seem to be very fortunate timing in the market," Carambat said.
"I understand some senators were previously very accomplished businesspeople, but in my opinion, the level of access they have to information currently is highly privileged and it would only make sense to keep their own financial best interests at heart."
Details about the stock sales in news reports prompted Carambat to look into the source of the data, which turned out to be the US Senate Financial Disclosures website.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @03:09PM (1 child)
I don't think the basic structure of oversight has broken down or been subverted, it is unfortunately is just being ignored. Think of how many Benghazi oversight hearings the Republicans had when they had the House majority, and how many email server hearings they had. Dozens of hearings and hundreds of hours on each one spanning YEARS. In the fall of 2015 everyone (including Trump) expected Clinton to win, the head of the oversight committee (Jason Chaffetz) said they were looking forward to years of investigations [washingtonpost.com] for things they had already been investigating for years. Then Trump unexpectedly won and the Republicans did ZERO oversight. Absolutely NONE on all the criminal and potentially criminal things he did. At least two Oversight Committee chairmen resigned out of Congress because they knew how awful it would be to stay in that job and turn a blind eye to everything. Then when the House flipped and some real oversight was actually being carried out, the Senate stepped up and refused to do anything. Actually they were worse because they actively worked with the White House to allow oversight to occur.
Maybe one can argue that dereliction of one's Constitutional duty is subverting the process, but I don't think so. With subversion one is actively working around something where with dereliction one is simply refusing to do one's job and uphold one's oath.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @03:13PM
Sorry, meant to type "disallow oversight to occur"