SCOTUS News: Ex-Twitter employee gets conviction tossed for venue error

A former Twitter employee facing charges for falsification of documents to obstruct a federal investigation is entitled to be tried in the district where the alleged falsification occurred rather the district in which the investigation was located, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court has ruled.

Petitioner Ahmad Abouammo became a target of a federal investigation based on alleged activities that occurred while employed by Twitter at the social media company’s San Francisco office. At the time, FBI agents based in San Francisco were investigating unauthorized disclosures of Twitter account information.

After Abouammo left Twitter to start a consulting business in Seattle, FBI agents from San Francisco traveled to Seattle to interview Abouammo regarding allegations that he had accepted $300,000 in exchange for providing confidential information to a high-ranking Saudi official about Saudi dissidents posting on Twitter.

During the interview at his home, Abouammo denied providing confidential information to the Saudi official. According to Abouammo the payments in question were for consulting work he did for the official after leaving Twitter.

When the agents asked Abouammo to provide documentation to support his story, he went upstairs to his office and allegedly created a fake invoice which he then emailed one of the agents waiting for him downstairs. The FBI later determined that the invoice had been created when the agents were at his home from the emailed document’s date-and-time metadata.

A federal grand jury in the Northern District of California indicted Abouammo for falsifying a record in violation of 18 U.S.C. §1519. The law provides “[w]hoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”

Abouammo moved to dismiss the §1519 charge for improper venue, arguing he could be tried only in the Western District of Washington where the alleged falsification of the invoice occurred. A federal judge in the Northern District of California denied the motion and a jury convicted Abouammo.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed, concluding that §1519’s intent requirement — “with the intent” to “obstruct” an investigation — made the “contemplated effects” of the falsification part of the “essential conduct” of the offense. Accordingly, the 9th Circuit decided that the statute permitted trial “where the investigation” the defendant “intended to stymie [was] ongoing or contemplated.”

The Supreme Court reversed, holding that a trial for falsifying a document must take place where the defendant falsified the document.

Click here to read the full text of the Supreme Court’s June 11 decision in Abouammo v. Saba Capital Master Fund, Ltd.

To the point

“Contrary to the Ninth Circuit’s view, §1519’s special intent provision does not lead to a different result. This Court has never looked to a statute’s mens rea elements in considering venue. Nor would it make much sense to do so. Take the first (and more typical) of §1519’s mens rea requirements: that the falsification be undertaken ‘knowingly.’ A knowing falsification occurs at the same place as an unknowing falsification — which is to say, at the place of the falsification. The mens rea element thus adds nothing to the conduct-focused analysis. The same is true of §1519’s demand that the falsification be done with the intent to obstruct an investigation. A falsification with that intent (like a falsification without it) again occurs wherever the falsification does — which here was in Abouammo’s Seattle home. The Ninth Circuit treated that second mens rea element differently, on the theory that it made the falsification’s ‘contemplated effects’ part of §1519’s ‘essential conduct’ elements. But that is not so: The statute’s concern with effects is instead confined to the defendant’s mens rea (or as the Ninth Circuit might put it, his ‘contemplat[ion]’). Section 1519 does not require that falsifying a document have any impact at all on an investigation — that it in fact obstruct or impede an investigation, present or future. (The statute thus differs from many federal laws barring actual obstruction.) So whatever obstructive effects Abouammo’s false invoice may have had in northern California, they were not elements of his crime. And because that is so, those effects cannot figure in determining where Abouammo’s ‘crime [was] committed.’…

“Our holding today is ‘discrete’ and narrow, as our venue decisions usually are, because it is based on ‘the nature of the [specific] crime charged.’ Section 1519 prohibits only one act: that of falsifying a document. Because the Government need show nothing else, a §1519 offense is relatively easy to prove. But with that ease comes one cost: Because the Government need show nothing else, its venue options are confined. The trial for falsifying a document must take place where the defendant falsified the document. Here that was in Seattle — meaning in venue terms, the Western District of Washington. The trial should not have occurred in the Northern District of California because no ‘conduct constituting the offense’ happened in that location.”

— Justice Elena Kagan, opinion of the court