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William Blake once observed that “a truth that’s told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent.” It turns out the Supreme Court agrees, at least for escaping liability under 18 U.S.C. § 1014. In Thompson v. United States (No. 23-1095), a unanimous court held that this statute criminalizes only false statements and not statements that are misleading but literally true. 

Patrick Thompson took out three loans from the Washington Federal Bank for Savings at various times. He first borrowed $110,000 in 2011. Then in 2013, he borrowed an additional $20,000. The year after that, he borrowed $89,000 more. These three loans resulted in a total loan balance of $219,000. In 2017, however, the Washington Federal Bank for Savings failed, and the FDIC assumed responsibility for collecting the bank’s outstanding loans. As part of the FDIC’s collection attempts, Planet Home Lending, the FDIC’s loan servicer, sent Thompson an invoice for $269,120.58, reflecting his principal amount plus unpaid interest.  

After receiving the invoice, Thompson called Planet Home Lending and professed confusion as to where the $269,120.58 figure came from. On the call (which, unfortunately for our supposedly befuddled borrower, was recorded) Thompson said “I borrowed the money, I owe the money—but I borrowed…I think it was $110,000.” Thompson later received a call from two FDIC contractors, whose notes of the call reflect that Thompson mentioned borrowing $110,000 for home improvement. He later settled his debt with the FDIC for $219,000—an amount that coincidentally reflected the exact principal amount of the loans he had taken out but apparently could not recall. 

Any elation he felt over his $50,000 in interest savings was likely cut short, however, when he was indicted on two counts of violating 18 U.S.C. § 1014. That statute prohibits “knowingly mak[ing] any false statement or report . . . for the purpose of influencing in any way the action of . . . the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation . . . upon any . . . loan.” One count related to his call to Planet Home Lending, and the second to his call with the FDIC contractors. Apparently secure in his belief in his own veracity, Thompson proceeded to trial. But the jury reached a different conclusion regarding his trustworthiness and convicted him of both counts.  

He moved for acquittal or a new trial, arguing that a “conviction for false statements cannot be sustained where, as here, the alleged statements are literally true, even if misleading.” Thompson argued that his statements about borrowing $110,000 were literally true because he had in fact borrowed that amount of money from the Bank, even though he later borrowed more. Cf. Mitch Hedberg (“I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.”). The district court denied the motion, finding that “literal falsity” was not required to violate section 1014 under Seventh Circuit precedent. The Seventh Circuit affirmed, holding that “misleading representations” were criminalized by that statute. 

In a unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Supreme Court reversed and remanded. In their view, this was a simple case. The plain text of the statute criminalizes “knowingly mak[ing] any false statement or report.” But “false and misleading are two different things” because a “misleading statement can be true.” And because “a true statement is obviously not false,” misleading-but-true statements are outside the scope of the statute.  

Much in the case ultimately turned on whether the natural reading of “false” includes a true but misleading statement. As one of many colorful examples of how even true statements can be misleading, Roberts discussed a hypothetical, which the Government conceded at oral argument, that “[i]f a doctor tells a patient, ‘I’ve done a hundred of these surgeries,’ when 99 of those patients died, the statement—even if true—would be misleading because it might lead people to think those surgeries were successful.” (The statement would be equally true—and equally misleading—if all 100 patients had died, but perhaps the Court thought that even its hapless hypothetical surgeon was unlikely to have botched all his operations). With that recognition in mind, Roberts quickly rejected the Government’s argument made with “dictionary in [one] hand” and “thesaurus in the other hand” that false can also simply mean “deceitful” and that “false and misleading have long been considered synonyms.” Unimpressed with the stack of books the Government brought to bear, the Court observed that this argument merely “point[ed] out the substantial overlap between the two terms.” 

Finally, the Chief turned to context and precedent. Starting with the former,  Roberts noted that many other criminal statutes do criminalize both false and misleading statements, including “[m]any other statutes enacted in the same period” as section 1014 (like such stalwarts of the federal code as the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act). This gave rise to the presumption that Congress’s omission of the term “misleading” from section 1014 was deliberate. And as to precedent, Roberts found support in Williams v. United States (1982), where the Court stated that “a conviction under §1014 requires at least two things: (1) the defendant made a statement, and (2) that statement can be characterized as ‘false’ and not ‘true.’” 

Justices Alito and Jackson each filed a brief concurrence. Justice Alito emphasized that “context” is key when assessing whether a misleading statement crosses the line into being false. Justice Jackson wrote separately to note that the jury instructions in Thompson’s case had actually been correct, referencing only false statements while making no mention of misleading statements. In her view, then, there was “little for the Seventh Circuit to do on remand but affirm the District Court’s judgment upholding the jury’s guilty verdict.”