Supreme Court Decision Syllabus (scotus)

Send us a textIn Thompson v. United States the Supreme Court held that 18 U.S.C. §1014, which prohibits “knowingly mak[ing] any false statement” to influence the FDIC’s actions on a loan, does not extend to statements that are merely misleading but not technically false.Patrick Thompson, a former Chicago Alderman, was charged under §1014 after disputing his loan balance in conversations with FDIC contractors, stating he had only borrowed $110,000 when in fact he had borrowed $219,000 in total. A jury convicted him, and the lower courts upheld the conviction on the basis that his statements, though potentially technically true, were misleading. They concluded §1014 criminalizes misleading statements.The Supreme Court reversed, emphasizing that the statute's text criminalizes only “false” statements—not misleading ones. The Court distinguished between the two, noting that misleading statements can be true, and true statements are not false. Because Congress included only the word “false,” and not “misleadi