Friend, This is a scandal that shouldn’t have happened. Two weeks before COVID-19 caused record-setting market crashes, U.S. Sen. Richard Burr sold off up to $1.72 million in stocks. Thanks to the STOCK Act, a 2012 law that Public Citizen championed, it’s illegal for members of Congress to trade stocks based on nonpublic information. The FBI, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Securities and Exchange Comission and U.S. Senate Ethics Committee are all investigating Burr’s trades. They have a near impossible task: determining whether Burr traded because of what he heard on the news (legal) or what he heard in classified meetings (illegal). There’s an easy solution to making sure this never happens again. Members of Congress shouldn’t be able to trade individual stocks at all. Sign the petition now. The STOCK Act can work. Just ask former U.S. Rep. Chris Collins, who received a more than two-year jail sentence for insider trading. But we can’t always rely on a smoking gun, like the insider trading texts that Collins sent. Remove the risk: Ban Congress from buying and selling individual stocks. Thank you for taking action, Bret Thompson
Public Citizen’s Online Action Team | 
