In an op-ed for the Washington Post this Friday, Greg Sargent writes that while President Trump’s initial attempts to downplay the seriousness of the coronavirus is shocking enough, the bigger question is what Republican officials knew and when — a question that’s been made more urgent in the wake of news that GOP Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped a large share of his stocks last month after he was briefed on the impending health crisis.

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Compounding Burr’s problems is a private speech he gave the same month to a group of “well-connected players” where he compared the coronavirus to the 1918 flu pandemic — all while Trump was telling the American public that they had nothing to worry about. In a Twitter screed, Burr said new outlets are “knowingly and irresponsibly” misrepresenting the speech. But according to Sargent, his defense actually indicts Trump.

“One of Burr’s claims in his and Trump’s defense is that it’s unfair to claim daylight between Burr’s private warnings about the coronavirus and Trump’s downplaying of it,” Sargent writes. “Burr is pointing to a briefing that Trump and administration officials gave in late February, suggesting that this showed that they warned Americans about the need to ‘begin making plans’ for serious inconveniences to come. But that very same briefing from Trump and his officials actually shows them vastly downplaying the threat and vastly inflating the success of their own efforts.”

According to Sargent, Burr’s own defense shows that the Trump administration “was dramatically misleading the public, even as Burr privately warned that the situation was far more dire.”

Read Sargent’s full op-ed over at The Washington Post.