.By Mary Clare Jalonick and Eric Tucker
Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., stepped aside as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday after the FBI served a search warrant for his phone as part of an ongoing insider-trading investigation tied to the coronavirus pandemic.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced the move, saying he and Burr had agreed it was in the Senate's best interests.
FBI officials showed up at Burr's home with the warrant on Wednesday, marking a significant escalation into the Justice Department's investigation into whether Burr broke the law with a well-timed sale of stocks before the coronavirus caused markets to plummet,
The Justice Department declined to comment. His attorney did not respond to phone and email messages, but said last month that the law is clear that any senator can participate in stock market trading based on public information "as Sen. Burr did."
The Congresswoman admitted that changes won't come in time for the midterm elections in November. But the question is no longer whether social media be regulated but what that regulation should look like, says Dingell. She says European laws serve as good models. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faces a House committee Wednesday for a second round of questioning on the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Congresswoman Diana DeGette, who is on the House committee that will question Mark Zuckerberg tomorrow, says perhaps harsher penalties will force companies to do more before breaches occur.
The shoe designer, who co-founded Jimmy Choo before becoming COO at her own eponymous brand, says talking to peers about what you're earning is the only way to find out if you're being undervalued.
It is extremely rare for federal prosecutors to get search warrants for lawyers "because they usually want to protect attorney-client privilege," explains Politico's Daniel Lippman. The fact that the FBI moved on Cohen suggests he "might not have been totally legal" in his work for Trump. The president blasted the raid, calling it a "disgraceful situation."
Democrats have already signaled that they're going to focus more on election interference and be "a little bit more aggressive than Republicans" during Mark Zuckerberg's testimonies this week, says Ali Breland, technology and politics reporter at The Hill. The Facebook CEO will appear before Congress Tuesday and Wednesday to face questions about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
President Trump's feud with Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos continues, as the president claims that the tech giant does not pay its fair share of taxes and that it's causing the U.S. Postal Service to lose money. Cheddar breaks down President Trump's claims and explores how Amazon's deal with the post office works.
The Facebook CEO's hearings on Capitol Hill will likely dominate headlines for days. If those stories focus more on the new initiatives that the social network has recently rolled out, rather than the data scandal itself, "that would be a big win," says Aaron Pressman, Senior Technology Reporter at Fortune Magazine.
The president is likely to respond to the brutal chemical attack in Syria that took place over the weekend, says Jon Miller, CRTV's White House Correspondent. That's based on the fact that, not only has the president taken military action against Syria before, but there also seems to be some support for some kind of a response among voters.
The trade war rhetoric "runs the risk of overplaying [Trump's] hand" in negotiations, says Clayton Allen, Vice President of Special Situations at Height Capital Management. That could, in the long run, come back and hurt employment rates in the U.S.
A lot of top executives of big name brands, like Apple or Starbucks, are starting to take political stances that are "unrelated to the bottom line," explains Aaron Chatterji, Associate Professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and author of a recent Harvard Business Review article about CEO activism.
