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Dick Durbin managed to do all right during the stock collapse. The senior Senator from Illinois and the Democrats’ number-two man in the upper chamber bailed out of the mutual funds that would shortly take a beating, moving his investments into Democratic contributor Warren Buffett’s fund, Berkshire Hathaway, just before the storm hit on Wall Street. The Chicago Sun-Times and Bloomberg report today that the timing was no coincidence:

As U.S. stock markets plummeted last September, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, sold more than $115,000 worth of stocks and mutual-fund shares and used much of the money to invest in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

The Illinois senator’s 2008 financial disclosure statement shows he sold mutual-fund shares worth $42,696 on Sept. 19, the day after then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urged congressional leaders in a closed meeting to craft legislation to help financially troubled banks. The same day, he bought $43,562 worth of Berkshire Hathaway’s Class B stock, the disclosure shows.

Altogether, Durbin sold investments worth $116,000 in September. By Oct. 2, he had invested $98,046 in Omaha, Neb.-based Berkshire Hathaway, the form shows.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index plunged 4.7 percent last Sept. 15 after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bank of America Corp.’s government-engineered takeover of Merrill Lynch & Co. By the end of October, the index had fallen 22.6 percent.

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Durbin cashed out on inside information: Sun-Times

The investigation continues. Chris Dood is also mentioned later in the post.