Sen. Paul failed to disclose wife’s stock investment

WASHINGTON — Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul waited more than a year to disclose that his wife purchased stock in a company that makes a COVID-19 treatment, an investment made after Congress was briefed on the threat of the virus but before the public was largely aware of its danger.

The Republican filed a mandatory disclosure Wednesday revealing on Feb. 26, 2020 that Kelley Paul purchased somewhere between $1,001 and $15,000 worth of stock in Gilead, which makes the antiviral drug remdesivir. Under a 2012 law called the Stock Act, which was enacted to stop lawmakers from trading on insider information, any such sale should have been reported within 45 days.

Word of the looming danger posed by the coronavirus began to spread through Congress in late January 2020, after members received the first of several briefings on the economic and public health threat that it posed.

The disclosure, made 16 months late, adds Paul to a growing list of lawmakers from both parties who have drawn scrutiny for their stock trading during the outbreak, which was declared a pandemic in March 2020.

Gilead stock traded for about $75 a share on the day Kelley Paul made her purchase. It rose to about $84 a share in April 2020, before dropping.

The Kentucky senator is not the first member of Congress to disclose trades that critics have suggested were timed to benefit from the pandemic.

Yet the $1,001 to $15,000 invested by his wife is also miniscule compared to some other lawmakers, who have bought or sold hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of dollars worth of stock during the pandemic.

Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski of New Jersey repeatedly failed to disclose trades worth as much as $1 million in medical and tech companies that had a stake in the virus response.

GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, of Georgia were investigated by the Justice Department, and ultimately cleared. Perdue had dumped between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock in a company where he was formerly a board member. After markets crashed, he bought it back and earned a windfall after its price skyrocketed.

Loeffler and her husband, the CEO and chairman of the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, dumped millions of dollars in stock following a briefing on the virus.