Loeffler’s “Suspiciously Timed Trades” Under New Scrutiny After Husband Bought Shares In Corporations “Set To Benefit From Then-Secret Bill”

A stunning new report spotlighting another series of suspicious and timely stock trades made to benefit the family stock portfolio of unelected “political mega-donor,” pandemic profiteer, and richest senator Kelly Loeffler is raising new questions about whether Loeffler has ever illegally “used the insider knowledge she gleans on Capitol Hill to inform her own portfolio.” 

As first reported yesterday by HuffPost, Loeffler’s husband, New York Stock Exchange Chairman Jeff Sprecher, went on a stock buying spree of up to $1 million in industries “that were poised to take advantage” of “very specific provisions” in the CARES Act in the days before the bill became public. The stock trading blitz came at a time when the “terms of the CARES Act were still mostly a secret, known primarily to Republican senators.” One nonpartisan government ethics watchdog put it bluntly: “one thing for certain is the senator owes the public an explanation of these suspiciously timed trades.”

Check out the recent coverage of Loeffler’s latest stock trading scandal:

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: The Jolt

• Another day, another investigation into GOP Senate candidates’ stock trades. This time, the Huffington Post dug into the portfolio of Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s husband, Jeff Sprecher.

• The piece looks into purchases made in March by Sprecher, who owns the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company. This was around the same time that Congress was negotiating a $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package. To wit:

• “The terms of the CARES Act were still mostly a secret, known primarily to Republican senators while members of their party crafted the legislation. But in the days before the bill’s introduction, Sprecher managed to invest in several industries — insurance and energy — that were poised to take advantage of the bill’s very specific provisions.

• “Those purchases are just the latest to raise questions about whether Loeffler, the Senate’s richest member, has ever used the insider knowledge she gleans on Capitol Hill to inform her own portfolio.”

The Daily Beast: Sen. Loeffler’s Husband Traded Big Before CARES Act Went Public: Report

• A senator’s husband could be in hot water after buying over $1 million in stocks this spring just before provisions of federal coronavirus relief became public. 

• Jeffrey Sprecher is the head of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange and husband to Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA). HuffPost reported that in mid-March Sprecher went on a buying spree while the stock market was in free-fall, reversing a selloff trend in his own trades from weeks prior. 

• The CARES Act set aside billions of dollars in aid for the country, including tax write-offs for industries Sprecher bought stock in. 

• At the time of his purchases, the CARES Act was still being written and wasn’t yet public, but Senate Republicans, including Loeffler, had received closed-door briefings of its provisions. If Sprecher acted with nonpublic information from Loeffler, that would be illegal. 

• Both Loeffler and Sprecher have been facing questions about their stock portfolio since the start of the pandemic. Just weeks before her husband began his March buying spree, Loeffler sold off millions in stocks ahead of the onset of the pandemic, The Daily Beast previously reported. 

HuffPost: Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s Husband Bought Stock In Sectors Set To Benefit From Then-Secret Bill

• In mid-March, with the American economy in free fall, Jeffrey Sprecher, husband to Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and chair of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, made an unusual change to his stock portfolio: He started buying. 

• For weeks, the couple had done almost nothing but sell. Loeffler was one of several senators who faced public outrage for unloading millions of dollars in stock before most Americans understood the towering threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic. Then shortly before the CARES Act, a $2 trillion emergency stimulus package, was introduced in the Senate, her husband reversed course and purchased up to $1 million in new shares, a HuffPost investigation has found.

• The terms of the CARES Act were still mostly a secret, known primarily to Republican senators while members of their party crafted the legislation. But in the days before the bill’s introduction, Sprecher managed to invest in several industries — insurance and energy — that were poised to take advantage of the bill’s very specific provisions. 

• Those purchases are just the latest to raise questions about whether Loeffler, the Senate’s richest member, has ever used the insider knowledge she gleans on Capitol Hill to inform her own portfolio.

• “The appearance of conflict is terrible for maintaining the public’s trust in government,” said Kedric Payne, general counsel to the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan government watchdog. “There’s a reason all our ethics rules focus on the appearance of there being conflict of interest: because perception is reality. It’s really difficult to maintain credibility when your constituents don’t know if you’re focused on their interests or your own financial interests.”

• Loeffler, though, has not supported calls for reform. In a tense debate with Warnock on Sunday night, she refused to say that senators should be banned from trading individual stocks, instead suggesting that criticism of such trades was “an attack on the American dream.”

• Deep inside the CARES Act, which became law in late March, was a tremendous tax break that disproportionately benefited some of the very same industries on which Sprecher had placed a bet. As a way of quickly injecting corporations with billions in ready cash, the CARES Act allowed businesses to “carry back” certain losses to previous tax years and claim a retroactive tax refund. 

• The carryback provision was one Loeffler could very well have learned about days before the Senate bill went public. In the three days just before its unveiling, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin met twice with Senate Republicans behind closed doors to discuss the bill’s particulars, and Senate Republicans held a private lunch to brief their members on some specific proposals the bill would contain. The day after the Republican luncheon, March 19, the CARES Act was publicly introduced in the Senate, complete with the carryback provision.

• Assurant is also one of the companies on which Sprecher placed a lucky bet: On March 18, the day before the CARES Act was introduced, Loeffler’s husband purchased between $250,000 and $500,000 of the company’s stock. Later, when the couple faced pressure to clear their holdings of individual stocks, he appears to have sold those shares at a profit. 

• The energy sector, in particular, benefited because the price of oil tanked in 2019. In the days before the terms of the CARES Act became public, Loeffler’s husband bought up to $250,000 in Chevron stock. The insurance sector also tends to benefit from the opportunity to carry back losses because its profits are so volatile — susceptible as they are to unpredictable disasters. On the same days as those closed-door Senate meetings, Loeffler’s husband purchased up to $650,000 worth of stock in insurance companies like AIG, Prudential Financial and Assurant. 

###