WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump has granted a full pardon to former U.S. Representative Stephen Buyer, an Indiana Republican convicted of securities fraud related to alleged insider trading while acting as a consultant to T-Mobile US ahead of the companies' roughly $23 billion merger with Sprint.
The White House issued the presidential proclamation on Thursday and announced it publicly on Friday. The document offered limited explanation for the clemency action, stating only that Buyer’s record of service as a U.S. Army judge advocate general and his tenure in Congress "was distinguished and highly productive." The proclamation also said the president acted on the "advice and recommendation" of 52 current and former members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives named in the statement.
Buyer represented Indiana in the U.S. House from 1993 until 2011 before moving into private-sector consulting. In March 2023, a jury convicted him on four counts of securities fraud tied to trades prosecutors say were made after he received nonpublic information from a T-Mobile executive indicating the companies were in merger discussions in 2018. He was sentenced in September 2023 to 22 months in prison.
At trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Buyer purchased Sprint stock after learning of the talks and later executed additional trades in 2019. Prosecutors said those Sprint trades produced more than $100,000 in profits and that Buyer also realized in excess of $200,000 from purchases of Navigant Consulting Inc. stock ahead of its 2019 acquisition by Guidehouse.
Buyer, who had previously served as one of the House managers during the 1999 impeachment trial of then-President Bill Clinton, took the witness stand in his own defense and denied that his trading was based on inside information.
In court filings ahead of sentencing, prosecutors had sought a three-year term, arguing that Buyer had abused the trust of clients and testified untruthfully. The legal avenues for Buyer narrowed when the U.S. Supreme Court declined in May of this year to hear his appeal of the conviction.
Context kept to facts: The presidential proclamation does not provide additional factual findings about the underlying conviction or new evidence; it cites Buyer's public service record and lists supporting recommendations from members of Congress as the basis for clemency.