Abouammo v. United States

Opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-5146_e29f.pdf

Case background

While employed by Twitter at its San Francisco office, petitioner Ahmad Abouammo provided confidential information to a high-level Saudi official about Saudi dissidents posting on the company’s platform; in exchange, the official wired Abouammo $300,000. Around the same time, Abouammo left Twitter and relocated to Seattle, where he started a social-media consulting business. Two San Francisco-based FBI agents who were investigating unauthorized disclosures of Twitter account information flew to Seattle to interview Abouammo at his home. During the interview, Abouammo denied giving the Saudi official confidential information and claimed the payments were for consulting work; when the agents asked for supporting documentation, he went upstairs, created a fake invoice, and emailed it to one of the agents. Back in San Francisco, the agents discovered from the document’s date-and-time metadata what Abouammo had done. He was indicted in the Northern District of California for falsifying a record under § 1519 and moved to dismiss the charge for improper venue, arguing he could be tried only where the alleged falsification occurred. The District Court denied the motion, finding venue also proper where the FBI investigation was located, and a jury convicted Abouammo. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, reasoning that § 1519’s intent requirement made the “contemplated effects” of the falsification part of the “essential conduct” of the offense, permitting trial where the investigation the defendant intended to stymie was ongoing or contemplated.

Questions Presented

1. Whether venue is proper in a district where no offense conduct took place, so long as the statute’s intent element “contemplates” effects that could occur there.

Holding

A defendant charged with violating § 1519 must be tried in the district where the falsification occurred; he cannot be tried in a different district where the investigation was located, because no “conduct constituting the offense” happened there. The Constitution twice safeguards a defendant’s venue right, and courts locate a crime by identifying the conduct that constitutes the offense and where it took place. Section 1519 prohibits only one act — falsifying a record or document with the intent to impede or obstruct a federal investigation — and once a person commits that act with the requisite intent, he need do nothing more to violate the law. The statute’s special-intent provision does not change the analysis: a falsification made with intent to obstruct occurs in the same place as one made without it, and § 1519, unlike laws barring actual obstruction, does not require that the falsification have any impact on an investigation. Section 1519 is therefore a standalone crime, not an inchoate offense tethered to some other obstruction crime, so venue must rest on the conduct § 1519 itself proscribes. Here, that was Seattle — in venue terms, the Western District of Washington. 122 F. 4th 1072, reversed and remanded.

The Court

Justice Kagan delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.

What this episode contains

This episode is an AI-narrated reading of the majority opinion in Abouammo v. United States, written by Justice Kagan.

AI disclosure: The voice in this episode is AI-generated, using a machine learning model styled to loosely resemble the authoring justice. Tone, inflection, pacing, and emphasis are artifacts of the model and should not be attributed to Justice Kagan. The text being read is the Court’s published majority opinion, lightly adapted to improve readability for the spoken format.