The Supreme Court issued a ruling Thursday siding with a former Twitter employee who sold company secrets to a high-level Saudi official, finding prosecutors charged him in the wrong federal court for falsifying an invoice.
Ahmad Abouammo was employed at a San Francisco office of Twitter, now X, when, in exchange for $300,000, he gave a Saudi official confidential information about Saudi dissidents posting on the social media platform. After Abouammo left the company and moved to Seattle, federal investigators interviewed him over the leak of company secrets. When Abouammo told investigators the payments he received were for consulting, rather than sharing secrets, he provided a fake invoice.
Abouammo was charged by federal prosecutors in San Francisco federal court, rather than a Seattle federal court, for falsifying a record, with prosecutors claiming he was charged in the Northern District of California because that was where the investigation originated. Abouammo asked the federal court to toss the charge, arguing it could only be filed in a federal court in Washington state, where the alleged crime occurred. After both a federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied Abouammo’s claims, the Supreme Court unanimously sided with the former X employee, holding that indictments must be brought in the district where the crime occurs, not where the investigation originates.
“The trial for falsifying a document must take place where the defendant falsified the document,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the unanimous high court. “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.”
The high court’s ruling also marks a win against court shopping by prosecutors, which has increasingly become a problem throughout the judiciary. Michael Fox, a legal fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice, said that Thursday’s ruling showed “prosecutors cannot manipulate venue or anchor a case” simply based on where they started an investigation, regardless of where the crime was committed.
“By reversing the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court halted a dangerous precedent that allowed prosecutors to forum-shop by strategically deploying agents from specific districts,” said Fox, who penned the Cato Institute’s amicus brief for the case. “This decision checks prosecutorial overreach and safeguards the local jury’s constitutional role as the conscience of the community.”
THE MAJOR SUPREME COURT DECISIONS REMAINING FOR THIS TERM
The ruling in Abouammo v. United States was one of a trio of opinions the justices released on Thursday, as the Supreme Court’s current term nears its end.
The high court still has 20 opinions to release over the final weeks of June in cases it heard during the current term. Some of the most closely watched cases awaiting a ruling include legal challenges to President Donald Trump’s firing ability, a pair of state laws barring biological men from women’s sports, and laws allowing late-arriving mail ballots to be counted after election night.