A federal appeals court on Tuesday overturned a former Nebraska congressman’s conviction for lying to the FBI about illegal campaign contributions during his reelection campaign, ruling that his case was tried in the wrong venue.
The United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco ruled that former Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry should have been tried in Nebraska or Washington, D.C., where the false statements were made, instead of California, where his trial was held.
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U.S. District Judge James Donato wrote in a 23-page opinion on Tuesday that Fortenberry’s trial “took place in a state where no charged crime was committed, and before a jury drawn from the vicinage of the federal agencies that investigated the defendant.”
“The Constitution does not permit this,” Donato said. “Fortenberry’s convictions are reversed so that he may be retried, if at all, in a proper venue.”
Patricia Hartman, a spokeswoman for the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, declined to comment to NBC News on the ruling or whether the office had plans to retry Fortenberry.
Fortenberry was indicted in 2021 and convicted in 2022 by a California jury that found him guilty of lying to federal investigators about an illegal $30,000 contribution to his campaign from Gilbert Chagoury of Nigeria, a foreign national, in 2016 at a Los Angeles fundraiser.
Fortenberry was sentenced to two years of probation, a $25,000 fine, and community service. He resigned from Congress after the conviction.
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The former congressman lied during two interviews in 2019 with FBI agents who were investigating the illegal contributions to determine whether he knew about them. The interviews occurred in Lincoln, Nebraska, at his home and in D.C. at his lawyer’s office.
Fortenberry was not charged with violating election law but was charged with lying to investigators, Donato noted. The judge said the district court ruled the violation could be tried “not only where a false statement is made but also where it has an effect on a federal investigation,” but the appeals court found that “the Constitution plainly requires that a criminal defendant be tried in the place where the criminal conduct occurred.”
