Mr. Grimes wrote back the next morning to apologize.
“David, I’m sorry. This email was not made for you. David wrong! ” He wrote.
Perdue then contacted his wealth manager at Goldman Sachs, Robert Hutchinson, and instructed him to sell just over $ 1 million in Cardlytics shares, or about 20% of his position, three people said. A person familiar with the investigation into Perdue’s business said the conversation was recorded in an internal Goldman Sachs record obtained later by the FBI
Financial disclosure forms that Perdue must file in the Senate show a January 23 sale of $ 1 million to $ 5 million in Cardlytics shares.
Investigators in Washington began to examine Mr. Perdue in the spring; In June, the US attorney’s office in Atlanta was handling the case with prosecutors in the department’s criminal division in Washington.
Hutchinson told the FBI that Perdue and his wife weighed only in broader investment issues, such as the proportion of stocks and bonds to be held in their portfolio, according to a person with knowledge of his interview. But a person familiar with the senator’s money management deals with Goldman Sachs said Perdue maintained a degree of discretion over what negotiations were made and when.
In this case, Perdue’s legal team told investigators that Hutchinson warned his client in October 2019 that he needed to sell Cardlytics shares to balance his holdings. The shares had increased in value and the consultants argued that Mr. Perdue should take profits from sales and reinvest them elsewhere to limit his exposure to the fluctuation of a single stock. Perdue decided to carry out these changes in January, his lawyers said.
Hutchinson declined to comment.
After conducting interviews, including with Mr. Perdue and Mr. Grimes, the investigators concluded that the senator had no nonpublic information on the company’s performance when he negotiated with Cardlytics. The investigation was closed in late summer, according to people familiar with the case.
If Mr. Grimes’ email was accidental, said Tai Park, a former federal prosecutor and partner in white-collar crime at the White & Case law firm, Mr. Perdue “may be on firmer ground, because this is objective evidence that the CEO was not trying to bring him down. In any case, trading based on information learned from a company’s CEO is extremely risky in any scenario and can get researchers’ attention. ”