Supreme Court limits where feds can prosecute in Twitter-Saudi spy case

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on June 11, 2026 that Ahmad Abouammo's obstruction conviction was prosecuted in the wrong state. Justice Elena Kagan authored the unanimous opinion reversing the Ninth Circuit: the only proscribed act under 18 U.S.C. § 1519 is the falsification of a document, so venue must be where that act occurred, not where its intended effects were felt.

Ahmad Abouammo joined Twitter in 2013 as a media partnerships manager responsible for the Middle East and North Africa region. The role gave him administrative access to a backend tool that could pull private, identifying data on any Twitter user — including IP addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and birth dates. Saudi officials identified him as a useful contact after he helped verify accounts tied to the Saudi royal family.

Bader Al-Asaker, head of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's private office with ministerial rank since July 2017, became Abouammo's handler. Al-Asaker first gifted Abouammo a Hublot watch worth approximately $20,000, then arranged for $300,000 in wire transfers to a Lebanese bank account opened in Abouammo's father's name to conceal the payments.

Between 2013 and 2015, Abouammo used his platform access to look up private account data on Saudi dissidents and critics of the royal family and relay it to Saudi officials. Prosecutors identified at least two specific accounts Abouammo accessed without authorization, handing over data that could allow Saudi intelligence to identify, locate, and target critics posting anonymously.

Abouammo's co-defendant, Ali Alzabarah, also a Twitter employee and Saudi citizen, accessed more than 6,000 Twitter accounts on Saudi officials' behalf during the same period, including at least 33 accounts that Saudi law enforcement had flagged via emergency disclosure requests. Alzabarah fled to Saudi Arabia with his family before federal agents could arrest him and has not been extradited.

A federal jury in San Francisco convicted Abouammo on six counts in August 2022: acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government under 18 U.S.C. § 951, conspiracy to commit wire and honest services fraud, wire and honest services fraud, international money laundering, and falsification of records to obstruct a federal investigation under 18 U.S.C. § 1519. U.S. District Judge Edward Chen sentenced him to 42 months in prison, three years of supervised release, and a $242,000 fine in December 2022.

Abouammo appealed. The Ninth Circuit upheld his convictions in December 2024 but vacated his sentence and sent the case back for resentencing. The district court then resentenced him to time served. By the time the Supreme Court agreed to take up his case in December 2025, Abouammo had already completed his incarceration.

Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in 1938 after the Dies Committee documented that Nazi Germany was running propaganda operations inside the United States through front organizations and paid American publicists. The first FARA prosecution came in 1939 against three Soviet propagandists. Between 1946 and 1966, 12 criminal cases were brought against 27 individuals and organizations, producing 13 convictions. Congress overhauled FARA in 1966, narrowing its scope from broad propaganda concerns to agents specifically engaged in political activities on behalf of foreign governments.

From 1966 through 2015, the DOJ brought only seven criminal FARA cases — relying almost entirely on voluntary compliance. A 2016 DOJ Inspector General audit found that the FARA Unit had no effective enforcement strategy. After Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged Paul Manafort and Rick Gates with unregistered foreign agent violations in 2017, the DOJ designated FARA a priority enforcement area. By 2024, registrations hit an all-time high.

Abouammo was charged not under FARA but under 18 U.S.C. § 951 — a criminal counterintelligence statute that prohibits acting under the direction or control of a foreign government without prior notice to the Attorney General. The key distinction: FARA is a disclosure statute requiring public registration; § 951 is a direct criminal prohibition on clandestine conduct. Maria Butina, who embedded herself in Republican political circles on behalf of Russian intelligence, was also prosecuted under § 951. Paul Manafort, whose foreign lobbying was public and transactional, faced FARA charges.

For tech employees specifically, § 951 carries the heavier practical risk: it reaches anyone under foreign government direction, regardless of whether their employer knows about it. Abouammo's § 951 conviction stands after the Supreme Court's June 2026 ruling.

The constitutional right to be tried where one's crime was committed runs through two clauses of the Constitution. Article III, Section 2 requires that the trial of all crimes occur in the state where the offense was committed. The Sixth AmendmentSixth AmendmentThe constitutional amendment that guarantees the rights of criminal defendants, including the right to a public trial without unnecessary delay, the right to a lawyer, and the right to an impartial jury.Key ConceptSixth AmendmentThe constitutional amendment that guarantees the rights of criminal defendants, including the right to a public trial without unnecessary delay, the right to a lawyer, and the right to an impartial jury.Open conceptBookmark adds a second layer: the defendant's right to a jury drawn from the state and district where the crime was committed. Justice Kagan opened her unanimous opinion by noting that Parliament's practice of shipping colonial defendants to distant jurisdictions for trial was cited as a grievance in the Declaration of Independence.

The government argued that because § 1519 criminalizes falsifying a document with intent to obstruct an investigation, venue was proper anywhere the intended effects — the obstruction of the San Francisco FBI office's work — were felt. The Ninth Circuit agreed. The Supreme Court reversed unanimously: Kagan's nine-page opinion held that § 1519 is a single-act crime, and the only prohibited act is falsification, so venue must be where falsification occurred.

When FBI agents visited Abouammo at his Seattle home during their investigation, he denied sharing any confidential information. Asked to produce documentation showing his $300,000 payment was legitimate consulting income, he went upstairs, created a fake invoice on his computer, and emailed it to the agents while they waited downstairs. Metadata later proved the invoice was fabricated during the interview itself.

Federal prosecutors charged Abouammo with document falsification in the Northern District of California — the district covering the FBI's San Francisco office — even though every act involved in creating the document occurred at Abouammo's home in Seattle, in the Western District of Washington.

The Cato Institute filed an amicus brief arguing that the government's effects-based venue theory amounted to effectively unbounded prosecutorial forum shopping, incompatible with the original meaning of the Constitution's venue and vicinage clauses. The brief warned that the approach would let prosecutors bring charges in distant, prosecution-favorable districts simply because that's where an investigation was headquartered — giving federal agencies with nationwide offices a near-unlimited choice of jurisdiction.

Freedom House's transnational repressionTransnational RepressionWhen a government reaches beyond its own borders to surveil, threaten, harass, or harm critics, dissidents, and opposition figures living in other countries.Key ConceptTransnational RepressionWhen a government reaches beyond its own borders to surveil, threaten, harass, or harm critics, dissidents, and opposition figures living in other countries.Open conceptBookmark dataset, covering 1,219 direct physical incidents perpetrated by 48 origin states between 2014 and 2024, identifies Saudi Arabia among the world's most active practitioners of cross-border political repression. Saudi methods include spyware deployment, rendition of nationals from third countries, proxy punishment of family members inside Saudi Arabia, and insider recruitment at technology platforms.

The October 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul brought Saudi transnational repressionTransnational RepressionWhen a government reaches beyond its own borders to surveil, threaten, harass, or harm critics, dissidents, and opposition figures living in other countries.Key ConceptTransnational RepressionWhen a government reaches beyond its own borders to surveil, threaten, harass, or harm critics, dissidents, and opposition figures living in other countries.Open conceptBookmark to global attention. A UN special rapporteur concluded in June 2019 that Saudi officials bore responsibility for the killing. Abouammo's data handoffs to Saudi officials directly endangered the population of critics and dissidents whose anonymity was the only protection they had from precisely the kind of state violence Khashoggi suffered.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act and 18 U.S.C. § 951 are the two main federal statutes governing undisclosed work on behalf of foreign governments. FARA requires public registration and disclosure of activities, finances, and relationships. Section 951 prohibits acting under the direction or control of a foreign government without notifying the Attorney General — no registration required, just notice. The distinction matters for tech employees: § 951 reaches anyone subject to a foreign government's direction regardless of their employer, and Abouammo's conviction confirms that a social media employee who acts as an instrument of foreign surveillance has committed a federal crime even without signing up as a registered foreign agent.

Foreign intelligence services recruiting tech platform insiders is a documented threat the FBI has specifically named. The FBI's counterintelligence division has briefed Silicon Valley firms on foreign recruitment tactics since at least 2014, and in 2019 the bureau publicly warned that China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia all use insider recruitment to access private platform data. The Abouammo case demonstrated the model: no server hack was needed. Saudi officials identified a cooperative insider, cultivated the relationship with gifts, and then directed targeted account lookups. Neither Abouammo's irregular account access patterns nor Alzabarah's access to more than 6,000 accounts triggered automated alerts at Twitter.