In a unanimous June 2026 ruling, the Supreme Court held that defendants charged under 18 U.S.C. § 1519 must be tried where the falsification occurred, not where a federal investigation was based.
The decision, authored by Justice Elena Kagan, reversed a Ninth Circuit judgment that had upheld the San Francisco conviction of Ahmad Abouammo for falsifying a record in a federal investigation.
Abouammo had worked as a Twitter employee and used his position to pass confidential information about two dissidents to a Saudi official, receiving $300,000 in exchange for the sensitive data.
When FBI agents interviewed Abouammo at his Seattle home in October 2018, he disappeared upstairs and fabricated a fake invoice with conflicting metadata, which he then emailed to the agents.
The Northern District of California had found venue proper in San Francisco because that was where the FBI investigation was located, a position the Ninth Circuit affirmed in December 2024.
The Supreme Court rejected that reasoning outright. “Because the only proscribed event is falsification, venue must be where falsification occurred,” Justice Kagan wrote for a 9-0 Court.
“Here, that means venue must be in the district encompassing Seattle, where Abouammo created the false invoice. It could not be in the Northern District of California, hundreds of miles away from that prohibited conduct,” Kagan continued.
The Court also firmly dismissed the argument that § 1519’s intent language, specifically the phrase “with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence,” could shift venue to wherever the obstructive effects were felt.
“Whatever obstructive effects Abouammo’s false invoice may have had in Northern California, they were not elements of his crime,” the Court concluded, adding that such effects therefore could not determine where the crime was committed.
Justice Kagan grounded the ruling in constitutional text, noting that Article III requires criminal trials to be held in the state where crimes are committed, a command reinforced by the Sixth Amendment’s jury clause.
The decision carries broad implications for white-collar prosecutions, as many federal obstruction and fraud statutes contain similar effects-based language, including 18 U.S.C. § 1505, 18 U.S.C. § 1014, and 26 U.S.C. § 7212.
The ruling echoes a 2023 Ninth Circuit decision in United States v. Fortenberry, 89 F.4th 702, where Judge James Donato wrote that the Venue and Vicinage Clauses “may not be disregarded simply because it suits the convenience of federal prosecutors.”
Justice Kagan cautioned that the holding remains narrow, noting the decision “is ‘discrete’ and narrow, as our venue decisions usually are, because it is based on ‘the nature of the [specific] crime charged.'”
Legal practitioners warn that defendants must raise improper venue challenges promptly, as the right can be waived if not included in an initial motion to dismiss or a responsive pleading under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12.
The Abouammo ruling makes clear that prosecutors cannot manufacture a favourable forum by pointing to where the downstream effects of alleged criminal conduct were eventually felt.