Abouammo v. United States
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a former Twitter employee who fabricated an invoice in Seattle had to be tried in Seattle — not San Francisco, where the FBI investigation he was trying to derail was based.
The decision clarifies that for the federal crime of falsifying documents to obstruct an investigation, the only thing that fixes the location of the trial is where the fake document was actually created — not where investigators were working.
“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 Court's plain statement of its core holding on where document-falsification cases must be tried.
How it got here: Abouammo was indicted and convicted in federal court in San Francisco; he challenged venue throughout; the Ninth Circuit affirmed; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Ahmad Abouammo, a former Twitter employee who worked in San Francisco, secretly gave a Saudi official confidential information about Saudi dissidents using the platform and was paid $300,000 in return. When FBI agents based in San Francisco flew to his home in Seattle to question him, he slipped away, typed up a fake invoice on his computer to explain the payments, and emailed it to one of the agents. After the agents returned to San Francisco, they discovered from the document's digital timestamp that the invoice had just been created.
The question before the Court
Could federal prosecutors try a man in San Francisco for creating a fake document in Seattle, simply because the FBI investigation he was trying to obstruct was based in San Francisco?
The Court's answer
No — a person charged with falsifying a document under the federal statute (18 U.S.C. § 1519) must be tried where the falsification took place, not where the investigation being obstructed was located. Because Abouammo created the fake invoice in Seattle, he had to be tried in Seattle, and the trial in San Francisco was improper.
The Court reasoned that the statute makes only one act criminal: the falsification itself. The crime is complete the moment the document is falsified with the required intent — no further step is needed. The location of the FBI investigation is irrelevant to where the crime occurred. The government's intent to obstruct happens at the same place as the act of falsifying, and an investigation's effects in another state are not elements of the crime.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Federal prosecutors often prefer to bring cases in jurisdictions where their offices and investigators are located. This ruling limits that flexibility: when a person is charged with falsifying a document, prosecutors must bring the case where the falsification happened, even if that is a different city or state from where their investigation is based. Defendants gain a stronger constitutional right to be tried close to home.
What changes now
The Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit's ruling and sent the case back to the lower courts. Because Abouammo was tried in the wrong district, the conviction on the document-falsification charge cannot stand as entered. The government would need to re-prosecute that charge in the Western District of Washington (covering Seattle) if it wishes to pursue it. The opinion does not address any other charges Abouammo may have faced in the original case.
What this does not decide
This ruling applies only to the specific document-falsification statute (18 U.S.C. § 1519) and says nothing about venue rules for other federal obstruction laws that carry their own congressional venue provisions, such as 18 U.S.C. § 1512(i). Those statutes are governed by a separate, congressionally created venue scheme the Court expressly left untouched.
Concurrences and dissents
How the Justices voted
Majority (1). Justice Kagan (author).
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Constitution's venue protections — rooted in both Article III and the Sixth Amendment — require that criminal trials be held in the state and district where the crime was committed. Courts identify the proper venue by pinpointing the 'essential conduct elements' of the crime: the specific acts a defendant must perform to violate the statute, and the place where those acts occurred. This framework comes from the Court's earlier decision in Rodriguez-Moreno (1999), which the Court reaffirmed here.
- Section 1519 makes it a crime to knowingly falsify a document with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation. The statute prohibits exactly one act: the falsification itself. Once a person creates the false document with the required mental intent, the crime is finished. The defendant does not need to send the document anywhere, show it to anyone, or actually disrupt an ongoing investigation — the crime is complete at the moment of falsification.
- Because the only prohibited conduct is the act of falsification, the only proper place for trial is where the falsification happened. Here, Abouammo created the fake invoice in Seattle (the Western District of Washington). That is the only district in which the crime was committed, making the Northern District of California — hundreds of miles away — an improper venue.
- The Ninth Circuit erred by treating § 1519's 'intent to obstruct' language as an additional conduct element pointing to wherever the investigation was located. The Court rejected this approach: a statute's mental-state (mens rea) requirements do not change the geographic analysis. The intent to obstruct an investigation occurs at the same place as the act of falsification — wherever the person physically creates the fake document.
- The government argued that § 1519 is an 'inchoate offense' — a preliminary step toward another crime, like how conspiracy is a step toward the crime being plotted — which would allow venue wherever an overt act toward that ultimate crime occurred. The Court rejected this. Inchoate offenses (attempt, conspiracy, solicitation) are tied to a specific target crime, but § 1519 has no such target. A person can violate § 1519 by falsifying a document and locking it in a drawer, never taking any further step toward obstruction. Section 1519 is a standalone crime, so its venue must be fixed by its own prohibited act alone.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms United States v. Rodriguez-Moreno (526 U.S. 275)
Reaffirmed as the governing framework for identifying proper venue by locating a statute's essential conduct elements.