FAS

Mail Fraud Statute Sweeps Broadly

08.01.11 | 1 min read | Text by Steven Aftergood

One of the peculiar features of the prosecution of suspected leaker Jeffrey Sterling is that he is charged with a seemingly unlikely count of “mail fraud.”

The government’s contention (in Count Eight of the indictment) is that by leaking information to author James Risen, whose books containing that information were later sent by mail to bookstores, Mr. Sterling engaged in mail fraud.

Mail fraud is no doubt a bad thing to do.  But to a surprising extent the opposite is also true. The law is so broadly written that many bad things that a person may do could turn out to be mail fraud.

“The mail and wire fraud statutes essentially outlaw dishonesty,” according to a new survey of the subject prepared by the Congressional Research Service which describes the statutes’ astonishing breadth.  (The CRS report does not address the Sterling case.)

“A defendant need not personally have mailed or wired a communication,” the CRS report said; “it is enough that he ’caused’ a mailing or transmission of a wire communication in the sense that the mailing or transmission was the reasonable foreseeable consequence of his intended scheme.”

See “Mail and Wire Fraud: A Brief Overview of Federal Criminal Law,” July 21, 2011.  An abridged version of the same report is here (both pdf).

“The mail fraud statute was first enacted in the late nineteenth century in order to prevent city slickers from using the mail to cheat guileless country folks,” the CRS report really says.

publications
See all publications
Nuclear Weapons
Blog
New Voices on Nuclear Weapons Fellowship: Creative Perspectives on Rethinking Nuclear Deterrence 

To empower new voices to start their career in nuclear weapons studies, the Federation of American Scientists launched the New Voices on Nuclear Weapons Fellowship. Here’s what our inaugural cohort accomplished.

11.28.23 | 3 min read
read more
Science Policy
Article
Expected Utility Forecasting for Science Funding

Common frameworks for evaluating proposals leave this utility function implicit, often evaluating aspects of risk, uncertainty, and potential value independently and qualitatively.

11.20.23 | 11 min read
read more
Nuclear Weapons
Report
Nuclear Notebook: Nuclear Weapons Sharing, 2023

The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]

11.17.23 | 1 min read
read more
Social Innovation
Blog
Community School Approach Reaches High of 60%, Reports Latest Pulse Panel

According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ August 2023 pulse panel, 60% of public schools were utilizing a “community school” or “wraparound services model” at the start of this school year—up from 45% last year.

11.17.23 | 4 min read
read more