Washington: President Donald Trump has granted a pardon to former U.S. Representative Stephen Buyer, a Republican from Indiana. Buyer was found guilty of securities fraud in 2018 for insider trading while working as a consultant for T-Mobile US, just before a major $23 billion merger with Sprint.
The pardon was announced by the White House and comes with no detailed explanation, except to highlight Buyer’s commendable service as a U.S. Army judge advocate general and his productive tenure in Congress. The statement noted that this decision was made based on the advice of 52 current and former members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
Buyer represented Indiana in the House from 1993 to 2011 and later became a corporate consultant. He was convicted in March 2023 on four counts of securities fraud and was sentenced to 22 months behind bars in September of that year. Prosecutors revealed that Buyer had bought Sprint stock after getting insider information from a T-Mobile executive about merger discussions in 2018, and he made further illegal trades the next year.
Prosecutors claimed that Buyer profited over $100,000 from his Sprint stock trades and more than $200,000 by investing in Navigant Consulting Inc. before it was acquired by Guidehouse in 2019. During his trial, where he was one of the House managers in Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial, he testified that he did not trade based on insider information. Prosecutors sought a three-year prison term, arguing that Buyer had broken his clients’ trust and lied while under oath.
In May of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Buyer’s appeal regarding his conviction.
