Last March, the Supreme Court limited the federal government’s use of a familiar weapon in the arsenal against white-collar crime, 18 U.S.C. § 1014.  The decision, Thompson v. United States, 604 U.S. 408 (2025), eliminated culpability under the law if an individual provides misleading, but not literally false, information to a bank or financial institution in connection with a loan. While the Thompson decision analyzed the specific language of § 1014, its reasoning could signal a seismic shift in the way certain federal fraud cases are investigated and prosecuted going forward. 

18 U.S.C. § 1014 criminalizes the making of a “false statement or report” for the purpose of influencing in any way the action of a variety of institutions, including any institution the accounts of which are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in connection with a loan or insurance agreement. Under this law, false statements knowingly made on bank applications for mortgages and loans exposes individuals and corporations to a term of imprisonment of up to 30 years and a fine of up to $1,000,000.  But what if the statement was misleading or omitted a critical piece of information? The defendant in Thompson had taken out three loans from a bank totaling $219,000 but, when questioned by an FDIC customer service agent seeking to collect on the bank’s outstanding loan, only copped to borrowing $110,000. The defendant’s intent was fairly evident: he sought to dispute the amount he owed on the loans.  The defendant then repeated the $110,000 amount on a subsequent call with FDIC contractors, and his ruse was at least partially successful, as he and the FDIC agreed to settle the debt for the $219,000 he borrowed without having to pay the approximately $50,000 in accrued interest.  

The Government charged Thompson with two counts of violating §1014, and Thompson was convicted after a jury trial. He appealed his conviction, arguing that he could not be convicted under §1014 because telling the FDIC agent that he borrowed $110,000, while certainly misleading, was not literally false.  The Supreme Court unanimously agreed and held that a misleading statement or a statement that omits key facts is not a false statement under §1014 if the statement is literally true.  Contrasting § 1014 with other criminal laws which proscribe the making of either false or misleading statements, the Thompson Court found that the omission of “misleading” in §1014 demonstrated that Congress intended that misleading but true statements could not form the basis of a §1014 prosecution.  The Court did note, however, that context was critical in determining whether a statement was in fact false or just misleading. In its recitation of the facts, the Court noted that on the first call with the FDIC customer service agent in which the agent said the outstanding balance on the $219,000 loans, with interest, was $269,120.58, Thompson claimed he had “no idea where the 269 number comes from.” Was this a “false statement?” The Thompson Court did not opine but sent the case back to the trial court to determine, from context, whether the defendant’s statements rejecting a larger loan amount were false.  

Context matters. As the Court pointed out, the defendant conceded that if he had provided his response after being directly asked if he had borrowed the $269,000, then the statement, in context, would have been false. But even the formulation of this hypothetical question posed in oral argument is fraught. Thompson didn’t borrow $269,000, he borrowed $219,000 and the accrued interest increased his debt to $269,000. So if asked directly if he had borrowed $269,000, he could truthfully have responded that he did not borrow $269,000.  The Supreme Court’s own hypothetical underscores the narrowness of its ruling: absent a carefully constructed question for which a response leaves no room for equivocation or doubt, the response may not be prosecutable under §1014.  

The key question following Thompson is the extent of the Supreme Court’s ruling on other commonly used white collar statutes criminalizing false statements.  To date, a smattering of lower courts across the country have distinguished § 1014 from similar statutes, limiting Thompson’s potential scope. For example, district courts in Illinois and New York rejected arguments by defendants facing wire fraud charges under 18 U.S.C. § 1343 that Thompson required a false – not just a misleading – statement to convict them. United States v. Madigan, 2025 WL 1836050 (N.D.Ill. 2025), United States v. Reese, 2025 WL 1770789 (S.D.N.Y. 2025).  Both courts found that the wire fraud statute prohibited not just false statements, but also “false or fraudulent pretenses, representations or promises” and so misleading statements which are literally true could still support a conviction for wire fraud. It is likely that the Supreme Court will be asked in the future to weigh in on whether a misleading but true statement can support convictions under the federal mail, bank, health care, or wire fraud statutes, all of which employ the “false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises” language.   

While it is likely that the Supreme Court will reject the application of its reasoning in Thompson to the federal mail, bank, health care, and wire fraud statutes, other statutes should be affected by Thompson. For example, the Fifth Circuit in United States v. Ryan, 156 F.4th 583 (5th Cir. 2025) did not distinguish Thompson’s reasoning as applied to a prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 1005, a law criminalizing false statements and entries in bank records, but found that the defendant’s affirmative statements and material omissions made by the defendants were sufficiently false to support conviction. The Fifth Circuit conceded that the jury instructions provided by the trial judge “permitted the jury to return a verdict of guilty based on ‘misleading statements,” but concluded that the instructions were either not erroneous or were harmless error given that the statements were (unlike in Thompson) misleading and false in context. 

While no published court decision to date has analyzed the impact of Thompson on a raft of other federal statutes proscribing the making of false statements, such challenges to prosecutions under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 (false statements to law enforcement ), 18 U.S.C. § 1015 (false statements in naturalization, citizenship or alien registry matters), and 18 U.S.C. § 1542 (false statements in applications for passport) are inevitable. These commonly used statutes all contain the same “false statement” language contained in § 1014. Courts will likely rely on Thompson and require the Government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that misleading statements made in prosecutions for violating these laws are, in the context in which they were made, false. 

Thompson’s influence also will be felt in the prosecution of “secondary” statutes such as federal money laundering statutes (18 U.S.C. § 1956 and 1957), and potentially even the federal RICO statute (18 U.S.C. § 1961). These statutes proscribe conduct derived from the commission of fraud statutes such as the ones discussed above. If the Government cannot prove that the underlying fraud statute was violated, then they will be prevented from proving that a defendant laundered the proceeds of such a crime, too.  In this regard, Thompson’s influence on future prosecutions cannot be understated. 

TAKEAWAY 

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Thompson v. United States should cause a recalibration in how certain federal fraud statutes are investigated and prosecuted.

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