He's an interesting guy. He is the son of a a presbyterian minister who during World War II was a member of a Navy underwater demolition team. That's cool. Richard himself became a sales manager for a wholesale lawn and garden equipment distributor.
Then he went to Congress. That's where the big money is, of course.
While Burr sat on committees focused on health care, taxes and trade, he and his wife bought and sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in an array of health care companies, banks and corporations with business overseas. At times, Burr owned stock in companies whose specific industries he advanced through legislation.
Of course you can make big money on bad news, which the former lawn care equipment sales manager understood.
Burr came under fire in March after public financial disclosures revealed that the North Carolina senator sold off as much as $1.72 million in dozens of transactions on Feb. 13, after receiving briefings on the threat of the coronavirus that was spreading from China and prompting lockdowns in several other countries. ProPublic reported at the time that "a week after Burr's sales, the stock market began a sharp decline and has lost about 30% since."
And the decent thing to do would be to warn his big donors of the impending doom. So he did. That's the neighborly thing to do.
However, all this caused distress among politicians who understand that this is insider trading, because they do it, too. Nancy Pelosi, for example, bless her heart, bought some options in the electric car company Tesla just before Sleepy Joe announced his electric vehicle plan. What a coincidence!
Eventually the Justice Department felt it needed to get involved with Richard. So it started an investigation and even seized Richard's phone. Can you imagine! That is just so wrong.
Richard is full of surprises. He twice voted that the impeachment trial of President Trump was not constitutional, yet he then voted to convict! That just doesn't make any sense, does it. He voted on February 13, 2021, exactly a year after he sold atll that stock. What a coincidence!
Overlooked in all this was that the Justice Department quietly dropped its investigation of Burr on January 19 just as The Donald was leaving office and just three weeks before Richard voted to convict Trump. After a nine-month investigation. What a coincidence! You'd think Richard would have shown his appreciation when he voted. Maybe someone in the new Biden DOJ whispered something in Richard's ear. Well, that's just speculation, and anyway we're not suppposed to know how Washington works. Maybe someone in Sleepy Joe's DOJ whispered things in other GOP ears. We'll never know.
Richard is a distant relative of Vice President Aaron Burr, who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. All charges were dropped. What a coincidence.
A leading scholar of the revolutionary period holds that Burr's character put him at odds with the rest of the "founding fathers," especially Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton. Because of Burr's habit of placing self-interest above the good of the whole, those men thought that Burr represented a serious threat to the ideals for which they had fought the revolution.
What a coincidence.