Feinstein husband sold up to $6M biotech during COVID briefing period

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In early 2020, as Senator Dianne Feinstein received classified briefings about the emerging COVID-19 threat, her husband Richard Blum sold between $1.5 million and $6 million worth of stock in Allogene Therapeutics, a biotech company. The timing raised immediate questions: did access to non-public information influence the trades?

When news of the sales first broke, Feinstein's office responded with a familiar shield. The Senator used a blind trust structure to manage her assets, her representatives explained, meaning she had no direct control over investment decisions. By this account, Blum's trading activity was entirely independent of any classified information Feinstein might have possessed. Case closed.

But blind trusts only work as a defense if they're actually blind. The documented facts suggest something more complicated. Blum made two significant sales of Allogene stock: one on January 31, 2020, and another on February 18, 2020. These dates matter. Feinstein, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was receiving classified briefings about COVID-19 throughout this exact period. Intelligence officials were warning select lawmakers about the virus's potential severity while the public remained largely unaware of the threat.

The stock sales themselves tell a revealing story. Allogene, a cell therapy company with no direct COVID connection, saw its share price decline sharply in the weeks following these transactions. If Blum had acted on general market intuition, the timing was remarkably prescient. If he had acted on information available to his wife through her official position, that would constitute a serious breach of ethics and potentially law.

The Department of Justice opened a probe into the matter but dropped it in May 2020 without explaining their reasoning or findings. No charges were filed. No formal investigation results were released. The silence itself became the story—not the exoneration that Feinstein's team implied, but rather an investigation that simply vanished.