Tag Archives: 18 U.S.C. 666

Some Things Are More Important Than Money: The Nature of Bribery and the U.S. College Admissions Scandal

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For the last two months, it’s been difficult for me to think or post about anything other than Russia’s war against Ukraine—and how this crisis might relate, directly or indirectly, to issues of corruption. But for today, I’m going to write about something a bit closer to (my) home, and substantially lower-stakes: the U.S. college admissions scandal, often known as the “Varsity Blues” scandal, after the code name that U.S. prosecutors assigned to the investigation. A quick refresher: a number of affluent parents arranged for their children to be picked by colleges coaches as athletic recruits, even though these teenagers were not in fact gifted athletes, and in some cases did not even play the sports for which they were recruited; this virtually guaranteed that the children would be admitted to the colleges in question, because those colleges had the practice of giving the coaches substantial discretion in choosing a certain number of recruits each year. (There were other aspects of the fraud, including in some cases cheating on the admissions tests, but the fake athletic recruiting gambit was the heart of the scheme.) The coaches participated in this fraudulent activity because the parents bribed them, via the middleman at the center of the scandal (and the purported “charitable foundations” that he controlled). In some cases, the parents paid monetary bribes directly to the coaches. But in some cases, the parents also—or in addition—made substantial donations to the university’s athletic program or the individual team, in exchange for the coach falsely asserting that their child should be recruited as an athlete.

That last, rather unusual aspect of the scheme—that the payments sometimes went to the university’s athletic program, rather than into the coach’s pocket—gives rise to a question that some of the Varsity Blues defendants have been urging in court: Can a payment count as a bribe (in the legal or moral sense) if it goes to the university? Obviously, this is not an issue in those cases where the prosecution has proven that money or other things of value were offered directly to the coach. But what about those cases that involve donations to the university’s teams or athletic program? Some of the Varsity Blues defendants insist that these donations cannot be bribes—even if we stipulate that the purpose of the donation was to induce the coach to falsely claim that an applicant should be recruited as an athlete, and that the coach did so as part of an explicit quid pro quo. The reason, proponents of this argument insist, is that if the purported “victim” of the alleged bribery (here the university) is also the recipient of the payment, then the payment cannot not a bribe.

This is wrong. Indeed, it is nonsense, and that fact that at least some judges have been entertaining this as a serious objection to some of the Varsity Blues charges reveals a deep conceptual confusion about the nature of bribery and why it is wrongful. Continue reading →

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Opinion in the “Bridgegate” Case: Some Quick Reactions

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While I’m still finding it a bit difficult to think or write about anything other than the coronavirus pandemic, there have nevertheless been some other newsworthy corruption-related developments in recent weeks. One of them—perhaps, I admit, or more interest to our U.S. readers than to others—was the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week in United States v. Kelly, which overturned the federal criminal convictions of two close associates of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for their role in a scandal known as “Bridgegate.” Back in 2013, when then-Governor Christie (a Republican) was seeking re-election, he sought to bolster his candidacy by securing the endorsements of several Democratic mayors of New Jersey cities. When the mayor of the city of Fort Lee declined to endorse Governor Christie, several of Christie’s allies who worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (the entity that regulates transportation in the busy New York-New Jersey region) retaliated against the mayor by deliberately closing lanes on the busy George Washington Bridge, creating major traffic jams in Fort Lee for several days. They justified the closures with a “traffic study,” but this, the evidence adduced at trial clearly showed, was an utterly dishonest pretext for an act of political retribution. Nobody seriously contests that what these Port Authority officials (who were fired after the scandal was exposed) did was a corrupt abuse of power. But was it also a federal crime? U.S. federal prosecutors argued that it was, and convinced a jury to convict, but the Supreme Court unanimously disagreed and reversed the conviction.

There’s already been quite a bit of commentary on the Kelly decision. A number of critics argue that Kelly, together with several previous Supreme Court decisions, “opens the door to a distressing form of government corruption,” and has made federal prosecution of corruption “nearly impossible.” Other commentators asserted that not only did the Court reach the correct legal conclusion, but in fact the law properly does not criminalize the conduct of the officials in this case—because doing so, according to these commentators, would have sweeping and undesirable consequences, criminalizing a wide swath of garden-variety political conduct (such as using government power to benefit supporters and/or lying about the true motivations behind regulatory actions).

I should confess right now that I haven’t followed the legal arguments in this case very closely, nor am I an expert in the specific statutes at issue. With that important caveat, my own assessment is somewhere in the middle:

  • I think that, given the wording of the relevant statutes and prior Supreme Court precedent, the Court’s decision in Kelly is probably correct, and certainly defensible.
  • I don’t think the decision breaks that much new ground or makes it substantially harder for federal prosecutors to go after other forms of corruption, such as “garden variety” bribery or embezzlement.
  • That said, the decision does highlight an important gap in the coverage of existing federal anticorruption laws, and I tend to think that the sort of behavior at issue in this case—behavior that, in the Supreme Court’s words, amounted to “corruption [and] abuse of power”—can and should be criminalized (under federal as well as state law). Such criminalization, if accomplished through a sufficiently well-tailored statute, would not criminalize “ordinary politics,” at least not the sort of ordinary politics we ought to tolerate.

Let me elaborate a bit on each of these points: Continue reading →

The Bridgegate Case May Weaken a Powerful Legal Tool for Fighting Corruption in the United States

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This past January, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that has the potential to make it significantly harder for federal prosecutors to enforce public integrity laws. That case, Kelly v. United States, centers on whether two associates of former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Bridgette Kelly and Bill Baroni, committed criminal fraud within the meaning of a federal statute codified at 18 U.S.C. § 666 (sometimes referred to simply as §666). Section 666 prohibits government agents from “knowingly or intentionally misapply[ing] property that is valued at $5,000 or more” and owned by an agency that receives over $10,000 in federal funding during any one-year period. Federal prosecutors argued that Kelly and Baroni violated §666 when they lied in connection with using public funds and property to carry out political retaliation against a New Jersey mayor who had refused to endorse Governor Christie. The alleged retaliation involved creating traffic jams by closing lanes on a major bridge (hence the moniker “Bridgegate”) using the trumped-up excuse that the lane closure was for a “traffic study.”

Kelly and Baroni were convicted at trial, but they are arguing on appeal that the prosecutors’ interpretation of §666 embraces an “astoundingly expansive theory of criminal fraud,” under which any public official could be indicted “on nothing more than the (ubiquitous) allegation that she lied in claiming to act in the public interest.” If Kelly and Baroni convince the Supreme Court to interpret §666 more narrowly, this could be the most significant change in U.S. public corruption law since the Court’s decision in McDonnell v. United States.

Continue reading →