"好話說盡，壞事幹絕"! - Richard Burr will step down as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee
leeliang letters 05/14/2020
This is a classic case of "Insider Trading" !
Most of the GOP top guns, along with Trump and his cabinet members, are
ugly and stinky! In Chinese words, they are almost all in the category
of "好話說盡，壞事幹絕"!
Richard Burr is a Republican Senator from North Carolina and is one of
the staunchest anti-China hands in the Senate, advocating that China is
responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Sen. Richard Burr will step down as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee while the FBI investigates his stock trades
https://www.businessinsider.com/richard-burr-to-step-down-as-chair-of-senate-intel-during-fbi-investigation-2020-5?utm_source=notification&utm_medium=referral
-
North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr will step down as chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee while being investigated for a series of
stock transactions he made earlier this year, Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell announced Thursday.
-
Burr dumped as much as $1.72 million in stocks in February, days after
reassuring the public the Trump administration was well prepared to
handle the novel coronavirus outbreak.
- Burr unloaded his stocks shortly before the US stock market plunged amid fears of the outbreak.
- His committee was reportedly getting daily briefings on the threat of the coronavirus around the time he dumped his stock.
-
The North Carolina lawmaker has denied any wrongdoing and a spokesperson
for his office said he is cooperating with the investigation.
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Misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic
- According to the Washington Post
, Republican government members were largely influenced by series of articles by
Richard A. Epstein
of the
Hoover Institution
, who in a series of articles consistently played down the scale of the
epidemics, ridiculed the "panic" being spread by "progressives", made a
number of incorrect statements about the SARS-CoV-2 virus, misapplied
and misconstrued Darwinian evolutionary theory in regards to the
pandemics, and predicted "about 500 deaths at the end" of the epidemics.[408]
-
Several members of the
U.S. Senate—
particularly Richard Burr
(R
-NC)
and
Kelly Loeffler
(
R
-
GA
)—have come under
scrutiny for sales of large amounts of stocks
before the financial markets crashed due to the outbreak, sparking
accusations that they had insider knowledge from closed-door briefings,
while many of them publicly downplayed the risks posed by the health
crisis to the U.S. public.[409][410][411][412] For instance, an audio recording from February 27 revealed that Burr (Senate Intelligence Committee
chairman) gave dire warnings to a small group of well-connected
constituents in private, contrasted in severity to his public statements
and not known to the public, that the virus is "much more aggressive in
its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history",
advising against travel to Europe (13 days before official warnings, 15
days before the ban), saying schools will be likely be closed (16 days
before the closure), and suggesting the military might be mobilized
(learned three weeks later from the recording).[413]
And more in the report.....
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Is China to blame for the COVID-19 pandemic?
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-04-21/Is-China-to-blame-for-the-COVID-19-pandemic--PRImh7pvMs/index.html
-
From January onward, as China was busy tracking the spread of the virus
and developing test kits, the volume of warnings also increased from
U.S. intelligence agencies. It was about the same time when Sen. Richard
Burr sold up to 1.72 million U.S. dollars worth of stocks.
-
On January 21, the first coronavirus case was confirmed on U.S. soil.
However, the sense of a looming crisis in the White House did not seem
to alert high-level officials of the Trump administration and the
president himself.
-
On January 23, Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, went under a
lockdown, with a nationwide battle against the new virus started. Scared
by SARS 17 years ago, everyone was in a wartime mode.
-
Don't forget, even then, some Western media outlets were still
questioning China's method, calling the lockdown "excessive" and a move
of human rights "violation".
-
"Western nations knew after Chinese New Year the impact of COVID-19 was
having, the lockdown in Wuhan, etc. They knew this was a serious
problem. So why were they not prepared? They knew what was happening.
China wasn't covering up. And in fact, China let the genome of the
COVID-19 virus be recognized internationally as soon as it was known
within China," said Daryl Guppy, board member of the Australia China
Business Council.
-
At the end of January, the U.S. reported its first person-to-person
transmission case. The next day, it closed its borders to travelers from
China, which seemed to be already good enough.
- Only it was not. The Trump administration has spent this period playing down the outbreak.
-
The critical window was lost, a window that could have been used to
produce more qualified testing kits and other medical supplies and plan a
more coordinated strategy.
-
It wasn't until mid-March that the White House started to take this more
seriously and announced a national emergency. The public was warned and
schools were closed, but an outbreak was inevitable due to such delays
by the administration.
-
As the CDC failed to coordinate testing kits, many more patients who
were not aware of their infection continued to spread the virus.
-
Looking back at the timeline, anyone could say, "If China did this at
this time, things could have been better." But don't forget that China
entered uncharted territory and started the battle on its own. Other
countries had a choice. The
group of people who accused China of being responsible for the pandemic
are the very same ones who played it down in the first place.
- The past is history; but the U.S. can still seize the
present to treat more people, instead of sparing no effort to find a
scapegoat.
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