On June 11, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously vacated an obstruction conviction against Ahmad Abouammo, a former Twitter employee who had been accused of passing information to a Saudi official. The high court concluded that prosecutors tried the falsified-document obstruction charge in the wrong venue.
The court's opinion, authored by Justice Elena Kagan, emphasized a statutory limit on where a defendant may be tried for falsifying a document to impede an investigation. As Kagan wrote, while the offense "is relatively easy to prove," the law constrains where prosecution may occur. "The trial for falsifying a document must take place where the defendant falsified the document," she wrote. "Here that was in Seattle - meaning in venue terms, the Western District of Washington."
According to the ruling, the Justice Department obtained Abouammo's obstruction conviction in 2022 from a jury sitting in San Francisco even though his only interactions with FBI agents were at his Seattle home in Washington state. The Supreme Court found that procedural error sufficient to overturn the obstruction conviction.
The decision relates narrowly to the falsified-document count and does not disturb other criminal findings against Abouammo. Those remaining counts include allegations that he acted as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, as well as charges of wire fraud and honest services fraud.
Abouammo, 47, had been sentenced to 3-1/2 years in custody for the set of convictions. He was released from prison in June 2025 while his appeal of the convictions was pending.
Court filings and prosecutors' allegations describe Abouammo's time at Twitter from 2013 to 2015, when he served as the platform's media partnerships manager for the Middle East and North Africa region while working at the company's San Francisco office. Prosecutors say that during that period he provided confidential information to a Saudi official about two Saudi dissidents posting on Twitter, and that he received a luxury watch valued at $42,000 plus two wire transfers of $100,000 each in connection with those exchanges.
After leaving Twitter, Abouammo moved to Seattle and launched a social-media consulting company. The papers in the case state that when two FBI agents based in San Francisco traveled to Seattle to question him at his home, Abouammo denied he had provided confidential information and said the payments were for consulting work. When the agents requested documentation to support his account, prosecutors say Abouammo created a bogus invoice and emailed it to one of the agents - conduct that formed the basis for the obstruction-by-falsification count.
Tobias Loss-Eaton, counsel for Abouammo, declined to comment. Representatives of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California, which tried the case in 2022, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Legal takeaway - The Supreme Court's unanimous ruling clarifies the territorial limits of prosecution for falsifying documents to obstruct investigations, underscoring that venue must align with the location where the alleged falsification occurred.
Case status - The reversal applies specifically to the obstruction conviction tied to a fake invoice emailed from Seattle; other convictions against Abouammo remain in place and were not addressed by this decision.