Christopher Collins, the former western New York congressman who admitted his role in an insider-trading scheme, has been sentenced to 26 months in prison, the Wall Street Journal reports. Collins, who won four congressional terms before resigning last year, was the first member of Congress to endorse Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. Collins was known as a pugnacious conservative who supported gun rights and was able to win his district in the suburbs and rural areas outside Buffalo and Rochester even when he was under indictment in 2018.
Collins pleaded guilty in October to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and lying to law-enforcement officials. In federal court in Manhattan on Friday, Collins, 69, asked U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick for mercy, breaking into tears. “I violated my core values and there is no excuse,” said Collins, repeatedly mentioning his experience as a Boy Scout. Broderick said the crime and prison term weren’t Collins’s obituary, as the former congressman had suggested. “Make some good come out of this bad situation,” the judge said. While in Congress, Collins was on the board of Australian biotechnology company Innate Immunotherapeutics Ltd. and owned nearly 17 percent of its stock. On June 22, 2017, while attending the White House Congressional Picnic, Collins received an email from the chief executive of Innate telling him that a multiple-sclerosis drug had failed its clinical trial. Collins then called his son, Cameron Collins, and tipped him off about the failed trial, prosecutors said.