No One Is Sure If It’s Illegal to Accept a $50,000 Bribe Stuffed In a Cava Bag, Thanks to the Supreme Court

This article is part of TPM Cafe, the House of TPM for the opinion and the analysis of the news. It was initially published on Balls and Strikes.

In a bite operation last September, the “Tsar Frontier” of the White House, Tom Homan, accepted $ 50,000 in cash in a Cava bag, the chain of relaxed and relaxed Mediterranean restaurants, infiltrated FBI agents which he believed to be business leaders to the lack of an inner track for government contracts, according to MSNBC reports. Homan was an acting director of immigration and customs application during the first term of President Donald Trump, and at the time of the FBI investigation, he had to resume monitoring of the federal immigration policy if Trump became an office.

The agents, who recorded the entire transaction, had planned to continue to monitor Homan to see if he obtained the role and followed his promise to pay, but now that he is able to play his negotiation, Trump’s appointments in the FBI and the Ministry of Justice have crushed the investigation. In a statement provided to MSNBC, the director of the FBI Kash Patel and the deputy prosecutor Todd Blanche said that their staff had examined the case which “came from the previous administration” and determined that there was “no credible evidence of any criminal act”.

The existence of non -criminal reasons to accept $ 50,000 in a Pita pocket probably surprises most normal people. But the Supreme Court likes corruption and has made public corruption are successfully pursuing success. In doing so, the court facilitated the task for people like Homan to take their alleged bribes.

Since 2016, the court has canceled at least three times the federal convictions of public corruption. First of all, the court came to the help of the former governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, who accepted more than $ 175,000 in gifts and loans from a pharmaceutical company in exchange for the creation of the company with free product tests in state public universities. Taking “official measures” in exchange for money (or any other value) is a crime under the federal corruption statutes. But in McDonnell c. UNITED STATESThe court said that there was no official action here, recondying the telephone calls that McConnell has placed and meetings he organized on behalf of the company as innocent constituent services. “The implementation of a meeting, the call of another civil servant or the organization of an event does not arise, qualifies as an official act,” wrote the chief judge John Roberts for the unanimous court.

Then, in 2020, the court helped the two former collaborators of the Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie who organized “Bridgegate”. The most frequented bridge in the world takes place between Manhattan and Fort Lee, New Jersey, and the mayor of Fort Lee did not approve the re -election campaign of Christie. Thus, without warning, the employees reduced the three ways of the bridge to one, creating a nightmare with the circulation supplied by spite. In an attempt to conceal their reprisals program, aid claimed that they were carrying out a traffic study and ordered engineers from the port authority to collect unnecessary data.

The fraud of organizations funded by the federal government, such as the port authority, is a federal crime. But in Kelly c. UNITED STATESThe court has unanimously reversed the convictions of aid unanimously. Because “the object of fraud” was not money or goods, wrote Judge Elena Kagan, it was not a crime, it was only a dick decision.

Finally, in 2024, the court saved James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, in the Indiana, who asked a company to repay its tax debt and contribute to its holiday fund after having awarded the company a lucrative city contract. He was condemned under the statutes of corruption which make it a crime for civil servants to request “corrupt” or to accept “everything that is of value” while “the intention of being influenced or rewarded”.

Again, if you are a normal person, this affair seems quite clear. But in Snyder c. UNITED STATESSix judges worked hard to find a certain ambiguity: according to judge Brett Kavanaugh, the bribes are “payments or content before an official act in order to influence the official with regard to this future official law”. But “a sign of appreciation” after the fact is only a “gratuity”, which is, in the estimate of the court, legally a-on-ony.

Perhaps as a nod to the permissive treatment by the Court of Public Corruption, officials of the Ministry of Justice of Trump declared to the New York Times That they doubted that they could assert Homan’s file before a jury: they did not have proof that Homan had agreed to do specific acts for money, they said, and Homan was not a civil servant at the time. For this reason, the Times I hypothesized that the Homan investigation could have “been abandoned, whatever the controlled part of the White House”: even if the Ministry of Justice of Trump did not abandon the case in order to protect Homan – a large Si – the court has created a legal landscape which often makes prosecutors in corruption cases to know if they are on solid ground.

The lax attitude of the Court towards the law on public corruption has left the federal law poorly equipped to respond to the realities of the functioning of corruption – leaving those free to keep hands and bags to take away, ready to take advantage.