a life of somedays

‘L'art gothique’ by Louis Gonse. Cover design by Eugène Grasset, binding by René Wiener, Nancy, ca. 1898.

As outlandish as this might seem, Trump has now extended clemency to almost all of the Republican congressmen convicted of felonies in the 21st century.

Jun. 8, 2026, 9:27 AM EDT

By Steve Benen

With Donald Trump in the White House, one of the most important times of the week is Friday night. That’s when the president and his team have an unnerving habit of announcing news they hope the public won’t notice.

Take this past Friday night, for example. The New York Times reported:

President Trump has pardoned Stephen E. Buyer, a former Republican representative from Indiana who was convicted of insider trading in 2023. The pardon for Mr. Buyer was endorsed by current and former Republican lawmakers, including Senators Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and former House Speaker John Boehner, according to the proclamation, which was dated June 4.

Buyer’s congressional career came to an unfortunate end in 2010, when the Indiana Republican faced allegations that he used a scholarship fund as a front to travel to pricey vacation locales to hobnob with donors. In fact, the fund reportedly never awarded a single scholarship.

Almost immediately after the controversy came to light, Buyer announced his retirement, although he said his decision was related to his wife’s health.

After leaving Capitol Hill and beginning a private consulting career, Buyer’s troubles managed to get worse, and in 2023 he was sentenced to 22 months in prison stemming from four counts of securities fraud related to a pair of insider trading schemes in 2018 and 2019.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

(CNN) — Sam Bankman-Fried, the former crypto billionaire who orchestrated one of the largest financial frauds in history, officially asked President Donald Trump for a pardon, according to the Justice Department’s website.

Bankman-Fried, 34, co-founded the disgraced crypto exchange FTX and was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024. Bankman-Fried’s application with the Justice Department, first reported by Bloomberg, is for a “pardon after completion of sentence.”

Residential buildings, enterprises, administrative buildings, cars and other infrastructure were damaged.

Attributed to Jacob Heise (1621 - circa 1675), German, Königsberg, circa 1650-60, Tankard; amber, silver-gilt.

Courtesy Alain Truong

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