The Justice Department’s investigation into Sen. Richard Burr’s shady stock sales during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic reportedly took a major turn on Wednesday night.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the FBI served a search warrant on Burr at his home in D.C. that led them to seize the GOP senator’s phone.
An unnamed law enforcement official told the LA Times that investigators wanted to access Burr’s conversations with his stock broker.
The FBI agents had obtained the search warrant from the DOJ based partially on data they had found while examining Burr’s iCloud account, which the agents had accessed upon serving a warrant on Apple, another official told the LA Times.
Burr, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, is under investigation after dumping over $1.5 million in stock in mid-February, which was after his committee began receiving briefings on the COVID-19 outbreak. The stock market plummeted as a result of the pandemic a week after the lawmaker had sold the stocks.