A case will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on April 15 that court-watchers fear could further legalize bribery in the U.S., following other such cases that have been decided recently by the high court. The case stems from the bribery conviction of a small town Indiana mayor, James Snyder.
An article in The Lever investigative news site observes that “The Snyder case is particularly noteworthy … because it concerns a landmark federal anti-corruption law — 18 U.S. Code § 666 — which outlaws fraud or bribery within entities that receive significant federal funding, like state governments or universities. The plaintiffs in the case Snyder v. United States are arguing that the Supreme Court should significantly limit its interpretation of the law and rule that it should not bar “illegal gratuities” or rewards given to an official as a thank you for a governmental action. Legally, they say, this is distinct from a bribe, which involves a prior agreement to exchange money before an action is taken.
Snyder’s lawyers claim “The law should only criminalize explicit, quid-pro-quo bribery, which is far more difficult to prove to a jury.” Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Katya Schwenk, The Lever reporter who covered the story. Here she describes what happened in the case, and the possible wider implications of a Supreme Court ruling that could weaken federal corruption laws and legalize political bribery.
KATYA SCHWENK: The case revolves around this mayor in this small town who was prosecuted under this particular bribery statute. There’s lot of these different kinds of bribery statutes, and prosecutors chose to use this one, which not only makes bribery illegal – what people understand to be bribery: You pay a politician in exchange for them doing something for you, usually secretly or it’s sort of understood to be kind of an illicit agreement.
But this particular law that’s at issue in this case also makes it illegal to, if a politician does something, to pay them after the fact. In this case, the politician got $13,000 from a company he helped get contracts.
He’s appealed his conviction all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, with support from groups like the Washington Legal Foundation, groups that are backed by the Koch network, by oil and gas companies – that sort of right-wing legal apparatus that we see a lot in these kinds of Supreme Court cases. Obviously it remains to be seen what the Supreme Court is going to do, but it really seems that this case is designed to weaken protections that we have against corruption at both the local and higher levels.
This is the mayor, James Snyder, of Portage, Indiana. He was charged by federal prosecutors in 2012 or 2013. Briefly, what he had done, is he was in some financial trouble, personally, and he had given a contract worth a million or more dollars to a local garbage truck company. And there were allegations that he had rigged the bidding process to make sure that the city gave the contract to this company. And after the garbage truck dealers got this contract, they wrote the mayor a check for $13,000, which he claimed to be a consulting expense, but it wasn’t clear that he had ever done any work for the company at all – that was proven at trial.
Seems like a pretty straightforward, clear-cut case of corruption by a politician – something that I think most people will agree we don’t want to see this happening, whether it’s in a small city in Indiana or on the federal level. But he managed to get the support in his case of this whole right-wing legal apparatus, that has brought similar kinds of cases to the Supreme Court, similar bribery or corruption cases that have limited the scope, that have weakened bribery laws over the last decade or so.
And because of that support, they have worked this case up through the appellate courts to the Supreme Court,and now the Supreme Court will consider whether or not to weaken this key federal bribery statute and experts say it could have implications beyond just this one law, into various laws that deal with that kind of illegal gratuity.
MELINDA TUHUS: Can you just talk a little more about the implications of this?
KATYA SCHWENK: Yeah, the implications will depend on how the court rules, of course. They could agree with the government and say, We want this law to stand. People I spoke to were unsure what they (SCOTUS) would do, but several attorneys I spoke with said it’s likely that the Supreme Court took it up in order to weaken the statute.
If they do decide to rule in favor of this mayor and do so in sort of a broad way, they could weaken all sorts of bribery laws that deal with this kind of gratuity, which again, is this $13,000 the mayor got after he gave the contracts to the company.
This specific kind of bribe that is given after an official, a politician, a contractor, does something that people agree is corrupt. Which would essentially, if you think about this broadly, mean it would effectively legalize corruption, as long as you could say, “Well, we didn’t agree to have this payment scheme, it was just sort of a tip, or a payment that I gave after an official did something that I liked.”
Which, of course, is an easy argument to make because it’s not common for you to have evidence of a prior arrangement to give a bribe or money. And so, experts worry that it could have these broad implications that would really weaken laws that prosecutors use to bring bribery charges.
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