Trump Issues Yet Another Pardon, This Time to Former Republican Rep Convicted of Insider Trading
President Trump’s abuse of the pardon power is continuing, with the latest pardon going to a former Indiana congressman found guilty of insider trading. For Trump, the pardon power has wide utility: to protect political allies; reward behavior he would like to encourage; and incentivize people to be useful to Trump, either personally or politically, to improve their odds of receiving a pardon.
The New York Times reports:
President Trump has pardoned Stephen E. Buyer, a former Republican representative from Indiana who was convicted of insider trading in 2023. …
Mr. Buyer was sentenced in 2023 to 22 months in prison after being convicted on four counts of securities fraud. The authorities had filed civil and criminal charges against him for trading stock on information about two mergers that he had received from clients of the consulting firm he formed after leaving Congress in 2011, according to the complaint. …In its complaint against Mr. Buyer, the S.E.C. said that he had learned of T-Mobile’s plan to acquire Sprint from an executive from T-Mobile, one of his clients. Mr. Buyer then purchased $568,000 in Sprint securities, which rose in value by more than $107,000 after the merger became public, the S.E.C. said.
In another deal in 2019, Mr. Buyer learned from one of his clients, the professional services firm Guidehouse, that it would acquire Navigant, a competitor. Mr. Buyer bought more than $1 million of stock in Navigant, which he sold after the acquisition was announced, making a profit of more than $227,000, the S.E.C. said.
One can question what counts as insider trading. But insider trading appears to be one of the Trump family and administration’s favorite pastimes, so this pardon isn’t exactly surprising. The timing is its own tell: even as House Republicans advance a watered-down bill nominally restricting lawmakers from trading on inside information, the president is using his clemency power to wipe away the conviction of a congressman who did exactly that. It is the latest demonstration of Trump’s repeated use of the pardon power in corrupt, self-serving ways.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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