SCOTUS 9-0 (Kagan) Reverses Ex-Twitter Employee's Saudi-Spy Obstruction Conviction on §1519 Venue, Rebuking DOJ Venue-Shopping

On June 11, 2026, a unanimous Supreme Court (Justice Kagan writing) reversed the Ninth Circuit in Abouammo v. United States (25-5146), holding that a defendant charged under 18 U.S.C. §1519 — knowingly falsifying a document to obstruct a federal investigation — must be tried in the district where the falsification occurred, not where the investigation was located. Ahmad Abouammo, a former Twitter employee, had disclosed a Saudi dissident’s private account information to a staffer of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in exchange for ~$300,000, then fabricated an invoice when the FBI requested documentation. He was indicted and convicted in the Northern District of California (where the FBI investigation was based), but created and emailed the false invoice from his home in the Western District of Washington (Seattle). Kagan: “§1519 is an independent crime, not an inchoate offense,” so venue “must be based on the conduct that §1519 itself proscribes, not on the conduct another law does.” The conviction is reversed and remanded — a venue technicality, not exoneration; Abouammo can be retried in W.D. Wash.

Two capture-relevant angles, neither a capture-architecture ruling. (1) DOJ-rebuke: this is a 9-0, ideology-crossing defeat for the Trump DOJ’s litigating position (argued by Assistant to the SG Anthony A. Yang). The Court declined to grant prosecutors venue-shopping latitude even in a national-security / foreign-influence case — a mild check on prosecutorial reach that cuts against the weaponized-DOJ pattern (cf. the retaliatory-prosecution chain). It is logged precisely because it is a unanimous procedural ruling, not a captured one: an honest “the system pushed back here” counter-data-point that guards against over-reading every SCOTUS action as capture. (2) Underlying conduct: documents foreign-state (Saudi, MBS-staffer) infiltration of a US platform (Twitter) to unmask dissidents via a paid insider — on-thread for Surveillance Inc. substrate on platform-as-surveillance-vector and foreign-state access. The ruling itself does not touch the espionage conduct; only the courthouse.