The FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating a Tennessee real estate company with personal and financial ties to Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), The Wall Street Journal reports, and the federal investigators are separately looking into the relationship between Corker and the firm, CBL & Associates Properties Inc. Corker has made millions of dollars through trading CBL stock, some of that profit originally improperly undisclosed in congressional filings; authorities have reportedly found no evidence that Corker committed wrongdoing.
A spokeswoman for Corker, Micah Johnson, blamed the "baseless charges against Senator Corker" on the nonpartisan group Campaign for Accountability, which told The Journal that unfortunately "we don’t have the ability to tell the FBI or SEC what to do." Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and member of the Banking Committee, has a long history with CBL and the Lebovitz family that owns it, and CBL insists that nobody at the firm passed Corker insider information. So long as his 70 trades of CBL stock — several trades worth more than $1 million — were not based on inside information, Corker's trading is allowed under congressional ethics rules.
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