Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is facing lots of questions over why it took him 16 months to disclose his wife had bought stock in a company that makes an antiviral drug used to treat covid-19.
The stock buy happened on Feb. 26, 2020, before the public grasped the danger the coronavirus posed and before it was classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Paul made the disclosure in a filing with the Senate more than a year after the 45-day reporting deadline set forth in the Stock Act, which is designed to combat insider trading.
A spokeswoman for Paul said the senator filled out the form for his wife Kelley’s investment last year in Gilead Sciences — which makes the drug remdesivir — but did not realize until very recently the form had not been turned over. Paul filed the supplemental report along with his annual disclosure on Wednesday.
According to Paul’s spokeswoman, Kelley Paul lost money on her investment, which she made with her own earnings as a writer and consultant. The purchase was for between $1,000 and $15,000 of stock in Gilead and came on Feb. 26, 2020, two days after remdesivir was described by a WHO director as the only drug at the time known to potentially “have real efficacy” in treating the coronavirus.
Observers who monitor the corporate trading space say investments like this and the extreme delay in reporting it, raise suspicion about whether the controversial Republican’s family was trying to cash in on information that was not yet publicly known. “The senator ought to have an explanation for the trade and, more importantly, why it took him almost a year and a half to discover it from his wife,” James D. Cox, a professor of law at Duke University, told The Washington Post.
Other critics point out that concerns of insider-trading among members of Congress were already being raised during the reporting period, which should have made the Senator more attentive to disclosure procedures.
Paul is not the first senator to come under scrutiny for stock deals made before the pandemic was declared.
A number of insider-trading probes were triggered by stock sales by members of congress during January and February of 2020. The Justice Department investigated transactions related to then-Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma and Dianne Feinstein of California, but eventually closed the inquiries.