One year ago, the Daily Beast published a report claiming Republican then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia “dumped millions in stock” following her attendance at a private Jan. 24 Senate Health Committee briefing on the coronavirus pandemic.
The Daily Beast scoop landed with a bang, leading to weeks of unflattering news coverage. The scoop even birthed several negative campaign ads.
The scandal dogged Loeffler every step of the way during her Senate race against Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock, which she lost, even after the Justice Department and the Senate Ethics Committee cleared her of wrongdoing.
Loeffler is still mad as hell about it.
“The story was a political hit job designed to drag me into the mud,” she said Thursday in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“It’s really a case study in the extreme bias in the mainstream media and their total disregard for facts,” she added, alleging the broader press operates now as “an arm of the Democratic Party.”
The Daily Beast, which did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment, reported on March 19, 2020, that Loeffler “sold off seven figures’ worth of stock holdings in the days and weeks after a private, all-senators meeting on the novel coronavirus that subsequently hammered U.S. equities.”
The report included several eyebrow-raising details, including that, between assuming office on Jan. 6 and attending the private Jan. 24 briefing, Loeffler did not “report a single stock transaction from accounts owned by her individually or by her and her husband jointly.”
This is true. Loeffler reported no sales or purchases during this time period either individually or jointly with her husband, New York Stock Exchange Chairman Jeffrey Sprecher. Accounts belonging solely to Sprecher, on the other hand, logged multiple transactions between Jan. 8 and Jan. 24, according to a periodic transaction report for Feb. 7.
The Daily Beast article also revealed that the 15 stocks Loeffler reported selling “lost more than a third of their value, on average,” after she offloaded them. Moreover, of the two stock purchases made after the meeting, the article noted, one “was stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in Citrix, a technology company that offers teleworking software and which has seen a small bump in its stock price since Loeffler bought in as a result of coronavirus-induced market turmoil.”
But the former GOP senator says the trades happened without her knowledge, explaining that the accounts were managed independently by third parties (but not a blind trust). Her filings also show she was not told of the trades until Feb. 16.
Loeffler also says the message of the private Senate meeting was consistent with what health officials said publicly at the time about the coronavirus, including that “the immediate risk to the U.S. public is low” and that “the American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It’s a very, very low risk to the United States.”
“We can all go back to the 24th or the 23rd or the 20th and see that there was something happening in China that was in the headlines,” Loeffler told the Washington Examiner. “There wasn’t, like, a group of senators that were told there’s going to be a pandemic, but we need to keep it a secret.”
She added, “the briefing introduced us to the heads of HHS, the CDC, and let us know that there was a case or maybe two in the United States, but that they did not at that time believe it posed a threat or that it was spread through human-to-human contact.”
The takeaway at the time was that the virus posed no real serious risk, Loeffler said, nothing so dire as to initiate a stock dump, which, she reiterates, she couldn’t have done even if she wanted to.
“That was pretty much in the press immediately after the briefing broke up,” she noted. “Then senators went and briefed the press on it, and you can see that where they were saying, both sides of the aisle, saying we don’t see any cause for concern.”
She adds, “There wasn’t anything there that you couldn’t have seen on the front page of a newspaper. That’s a major fact that the Daily Beast story overlooks.”
Another key point to consider is this: Loeffler’s stock activity involved selling puts in oil, airline, and financial companies, which makes no sense if she was trying to protect herself from market volatility. Further, and perhaps most importantly, some of the trades that occurred after Jan. 24 went on to lose money.
Nevertheless, the Daily Beast story struck a nerve with the public, because, despite Loeffler’s protestations, the core facts of the report are still true. She did attend a private briefing on the virus. There were sales and purchases of stocks made by her accounts after the meeting. One may take issue with the Daily Beast’s framing of the story, but the raw facts of the trades and purchases are accurate, much to Loeffler’s chagrin.
“They didn’t dig into my opponent,” she said. “They dug into me, despite being cleared [by multiple agencies].”
The former senator also takes issue with the amount of time her office was given by the Daily Beast to respond to its requests for comment before it went to press.
“There was no diligence; there was no thoughtful questions. It was basically just already written,” Loeffler said, adding they were approached by the Daily Beast “late at night.”
Loeffler’s former spokeswoman, Nadgey Louis-Charles, was contacted for comment at 7:14 pm on March 19, an hour and 35 minutes before the Daily Beast published its report, according to emails reviewed by the Washington Examiner. A second Loeffler staffer, Kerry Rom, was contacted 19 minutes before publication. The second request stated the filing deadline was “soon.” Loeffler’s people did not respond to either request in time for publication.
So, what now for the former senator?
“We’re getting to the point where these efforts by the media to operate as a political arm for the liberal causes influences elections, and Americans need to know that the media no longer asks the questions,” Loeffler told the Washington Examiner. “They’re writing the narrative.”
She added, “The media has long been relied upon to hold authorities, elected officials, government accountable. We can’t trust it to do that today. It can’t be left to the media anymore. We have to have more sunlight on the facts and openness to the facts. And if that’s not going to come through the media, we need other channels.”
