Stephen Buyer sentenced 22 months for insider trading — despite ‘honor system’ claim

Former US Congressman Stephen Buyer was sentenced to 22 months in federal prison Tuesday for insider training — despite appealing for mercy from a Manhattan judge by claiming he lives by his Indiana hometown’s “honor system.”

“My life has been good acts. It’s all I’ve ever done,” Buyer, 64, said during a hearing in Manhattan federal court where he was ordered to report to prison on Nov. 28 to begin serving his sentence after a jury convicted him of securities fraud.

Buyer’s invitation to Judge Richard Berman to learn more about him by visiting his Noblesville, IN., hometown came after the judge found that Buyer — a Republican who represented Indiana in Congress from 1993 to 2011 — “repeatedly” lied on the stand during his trial.

Evidence during the two-week proceeding showed that Buyer illegally bought up stock in Sprint after being tipped off about the telecom giant’s $23 billion merger with T-Mobile while playing golf with T-Mobile executive Tony Russo in 2018.

A year later, Buyer, who had been working as a lobbyist and consultant after leaving office, bought stock in the management consulting company Navigant. He’d been given a heads up by his client, another consultancy called Guidehouse Inc., that Guidehouse would soon be acquiring Navigant in a separate merger.

Buyer made more than $320,000 for himself, his relatives and a woman whom he’d been having an affair with from the illegal trades, prosecutors said.

He was ordered Tuesday to make $354,027 in restitution and to pay a $10,000 fine.

Prosecutors, during Buyer’s trial, presented evidence of the ex pol trading messages with a colleague using an encrypted app in an apparent bid to cover up the illicit trades.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Buyer, wearing a dark blue suit, sat silently shaking his head as the judge accused him of repeatedly lying at trial — including by claiming that he didn’t talk “business” with Russo during their March 2018 golf games.

Jurors also did not buy Buyer’s defense that the trades were the result of legitimate market research.

Prosecutors had pushed for a 36-month sentence, arguing that Buyer’s decades of public service showed that he knew that the illegal trades were wrong.

Buyer’s attorneys, meanwhile, had pushed for community service and said Tuesday that the former congressman would appeal the verdict.

When asked to speak to the court, Buyer did not apologize, or speak directly about the case.

Instead, he brought up his upbringing in the Hoosier State, where, he said, someone buying a dozen ears of sweet corn for $6 off the back of an unmanned trailer could add the money to a bin $300 already inside of it without worrying that someone would steal the cash.

“It’s the honor system,” he said. “It’s how we live, it’s how I’ve lived my life.”

Buyer is an attorney and Persian Gulf War veteran who once served as a House prosecutor during former President Bill Clinton’s 1998 impeachment trial.

He will lose his law license as a result of the verdict.

Buyer declined to comment on his way out of the courtroom.