Trump Administration’s Private Signaling To GOP Donors Before Market Crash Raises Fresh Concerns About Perdue’s “Heavy Trading”

Perdue is one of the “most active traders in Congress” and has refused to put his assets in a blind trust

Perdue is under fire for buying stock in a manufacturer of PPE the same day the Senate received a private COVID briefing and later dumping shares in a casino company

ATLANTA — A bombshell New York Times report revealed that on February 24th, while President Trump and Senator Perdue were downplaying the threat of the virus, senior members of the president’s economic team were privately telling Republican donors about their concern for the American economy, raising new questions about Senator Perdue’s “heavy trading” that accelerated on February 24th. 

According to the NYT Report, the meetings were “a series of informal, off-the-record discussions with Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers.” Was Perdue in any of the meetings? Did he use information he learned from the administration to inform his huge investment changes that day? 

The report reveals that elite traders had access to information from the Trump administration that “helped them gain financial advantage” as global markets were teetering, detailing how a slew of investors passed information to money-management firms around the country as government officials were more aware of the threat than they were letting on publicly. 

After the Senate received a private briefing on the deadly effects of the novel coronavirus, Senator Perdue, Trump’s most loyal senator, came under fire for trading stocks early on in the pandemic and investing in “a chemical company that supplies personal protective equipment.”  

In April, Perdue claimed he has always had an outside adviser managing his personal finances and that he is “not involved in day-to-day decisions,” but later shifted his story on the trades, admitting that only some of his individual stock holdings were managed independently by an outside adviser, refusing to be transparent with Georgians about how his money is managed.

Senator Perdue has already been embroiled in another stock trading scandal after government and securities law experts slammed Perdue’s “suspicious trading” from 2017 saying Perdue’s “perfectly timed” stock trades in a company that stood to benefit from regulations on prepaid debit cards he pushed to overturn were akin to “batting 100 percent” and that Perdue’s pattern of stock purchases “stinks to high heaven.”

“Senator Perdue has refused to be completely transparent with Georgians as more details of his shady stock trades have come to light,” said Braxton Brewington, spokesman for the Democratic Party of Georgia. “Trump aides were secretly sharing vital information about the American economy with Republican donors while publicly downplaying the coronavirus as it began to spread – Georgians have a right to know what Senator Perdue or his wealth managers knew and when they knew it.”

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