Dick Durbin met privately with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke on Sept. 19 to talk about the economic crisis. The finance officials urged Durbin to help craft legislation to save ailing banks.
The next day, Durbin sold $42,696 in mutual funds and invested $43,562 in Berkshire Hathaway, the company owend by Warren Buffett.
Is it remotely possible that Durbin wasn't acting on what he was told first-hand by financial advisors not exactly available to the rest of us?
This one doesn't pass the smell test.
"Durbin was doing what a lot of other people were doing," spokesman Joe Shoemaker said, "trying to preserve some level of wealth by getting out of the market."
"Shoemaker said Durbin didn’t capitalize on anything Paulson and Bernanke told congressional leaders at the Sept. 18 meeting," Bloomberg reports. "Whatever information Paulson gave lawmakers wasn’t secret or classified and was disclosed publicly the next day, Shoemaker said."
But Durbin did capitalize on what he was told - he moved his money around the very next day, and even Shoemaker isn't suggesting that was a coincidence.
And if the information Durbin received in that meeting wasn't anything different than what was disclosed to the public, why did Durbin have to be in that meeting? Couldn't he have just read the press release?
And aren't these investments supposed to be in blind trusts anyway?
In this case, Durbin traded the shares himself using an electronic Charles Schwab account.
“There was nothing that was told to me that wasn’t in the morning paper," Durbin reiterated on Monday. "Nothing was classified or secret or confidential."
Then why wasn't the meeting televised live on C-SPAN?
"I’m not a wealthy person. I didn’t get into this business to make money,” Durbin said. “But I was watching the bottom fall out of my retirement savings.”
Fair enough. But maybe those trades should have been announced sometime between your big secret meeting and when you executed them so we were all on a level playing field.
Otherwise, it just looks really, really bad - and something you would have expressed outrage about had it been a Republican caught doing the same thing.
Steve Rhodes is the proprietor of The Beachwood Reporter, a Chicago-centric news and culture review.
