Supreme Court unanimously limits reach of federal bank fraud statute to fraud in Thompson

This morning the US Supreme Court handed down a unanimous opinion in favor of a federal criminal defendant on a statutory issue in Thompson v. US, No. 23–1095 (S. Ct. March 21, 2025) (available here).  The opinion for the Court, authored by Chief Justice Roberts, begins and ends this way:

Patrick Thompson took out three loans totaling $219,000 from the same bank. Later, Thompson told the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that he had “borrowed . . . $110,000” from the bank. Thompson was indicted under 18 U.S.C. §1014 for making “false statement[s]” to the FDIC. Thompson argued that his statements were not false because he had in fact taken out a loan for $110,000 just as he said. Both the District Court and the Seventh Circuit held that they did not need to consider that argument. In their view, the prohibition in §1014 against “false statement[s]” extends to misleading ones as well, and Thompson’s statements were at least misleading in failing to mention the additional loans. The question presented is whether §1014 criminalizes statements that are misleading but not false….

In casual conversation, people use many overlapping words to describe shady statements: false, misleading, dishonest, deceptive, literally true, and more.  Only one of those words appears in the statute.  Section 1014 does not criminalize statements that are misleading but true. Under the statute, it is not enough that a statement is misleading.  It must be “false.”

The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is vacated, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. 

Justice Alito authored a four-page concurrence making a number of points, and primarily stressing that “in considering whether a statement is ‘false,’ judges and juries must view the statement in ‘the context in which it is made’.”

Justice Jackson authored a one-page concurrence contending that, in this case, “the jury was properly instructed that it could find Thompson guilty only if the prosecution proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Thompson ‘made the charged false statement[s]’.”