After looking at these individual cases, I think:

Johnson seems to have been the victim of a completely wrongful accusation. His stock sales were complicated and seem to have nothing to do with either market fears or private briefings. He seems to have finally signed off on selling a portion of his family-held business to a large investor. That was part of a deal that had been in negotiation for years.

It appears to me that Loeffler, Feinstein and Inhofe have believable alibis – they don’t make their own investment decisions and are completely hands-off with respect to those decisions. If those alibis hold and they never contacted their portfolio managers to suggest those sales in some way, then they are golden.

Burr, however, is acting guilty AF and has no hard alibi. He did not deny making the decisions, but simply denied he had traded on nonpublic information. He said he had “relied solely on public news reports to guide my decision regarding the sale of stocks.” He of course baited the mainstream media, and in a move worthy of The Master Baiter himself, Burr blamed CNBC for his decisions!

And a reminder – Burr cast a vote against the anti-insider-trading bill that was passed 96-3 in the Senate and 417-2 in the House. Yup, he was willing to take the rare and courageous pro-corruption stance!