Sign Up for PublicationsMisleading But Not False: Thompson v. United States and Its Implications
Are “misleading” statements criminally enforceable as “false”? Not always, according to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Thompson v. United States, 145 S. Ct. 821, 825-26 (2025) (“Thompson”)—the effects of which could ripple across federal prosecutions and enforcement actions, and statutory interpretation cases more generally.
In Thompson, the Court analyzed a conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 1014, which criminalizes “knowingly make any false statement of report… for the purpose of influencing in any way” the actions of certain regulators and entities, including lenders and financial institutions. The petitioner in Thompson, Patrick Thompson, was convicted under Section 1014 after representing that he had borrowed $110,000 from a bank—a fact that was technically true but that misleadingly omitted his two subsequent loans from the bank. Both the district court and the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit sustained the conviction on the grounds that Section 1014 encompassed misleading statements and did not require literal falsity. The Supreme Court disagreed, unanimously holding that Section 1014 does not reach statements that are misleading but technically true.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts drew a distinction between the word “false,” used in Section 1014, and the word “misleading,” which is not. Chief Justice Roberts explained that, despite the substantial overlap between the two terms, there is an important difference: a “false” statement is always untrue, but a “misleading” statement may or may not be untrue. In reaching his conclusion, Chief Justice Roberts explained that many other statutes, including those under Title 18, expressly prohibit both “false” and “misleading” statements; interpreting the former to necessarily include the latter would render such statutory language superfluous. By contrast, none of the predecessor provisions to Section 1014 used the word “misleading”; had Congress intended for Section 1014 to cover misleading statements as well as false ones, it would have done so expressly.
The precise impact of Thompson will play out in lower courts in the coming months. Although the direct effect of Thompson is limited to Section 1014, the opinion likely will have broad indirect effects on criminal prosecutions and government enforcement actions—and on statutory interpretation more generally.
First, Thompson will likely affect the interpretation of various other federal statutes that criminalize making “false” statements (as opposed to statements that are, more broadly, “false or misleading,” “false or fraudulent,” or “manipulative or deceptive”). For example, 18 U.S.C. § 1015 criminalizes “false” statements concerning naturalization, citizenship, and alien registry; 18 U.S.C. § 1020 criminalizes “false” statements related to highway projects; 18 U.S.C. § 1542 criminalizes “false” statements concerning U.S. passports; and 31 U.S.C. § 3729 prohibits “false” statements related to the payment of money or property to the government. Thompson provides a new defense to individuals and corporate entities facing prosecution and enforcement actions under these statutes.
Second, Thompson will likely affect statutory interpretation more broadly. Indeed, this pattern has already emerged in the three publicly available decisions applying the Thompson opinion. In KBC Asset Management. NV v. Discovery Financial Services., which granted a motion to dismiss a civil securities fraud suit under 15 U.S.C. Section 78j(b) and Rule 10b-5(b), the Northern District of Illinois relied on Thompson to draw a distinction between a false statement (which “asserts facts that are untrue when the statement was made”) and a misleading one (which may include a “literally true” statement that “implies something that is false”). No. 23-CV-06788, 2025 WL 976120, *4 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 31, 2025). Thompson also has been cited twice in cases interpreting the Video Privacy Protection Act (“VPPA”), 18 U.S.C. § 2710. In Salazar v. Paramount Global, the Sixth Circuit quoted Thompson in finding that “[c]ontext from the time of the [statute’s] enactment” supported a restrictive interpretation of the phrase “goods and services” under the VPPA (just as the Supreme Court had found with respect to Section 1014). 133 F.4th 642, 651 (6th Cir. 2025). And in Gardner v. Me-TV National Limited Partnership, the Seventh Circuit relied on Thompson to support a strict textualist reading of the VPPA, holding that “[t]he Supreme Court insist[ed] that it is the language—the only thing on which Congress and the President have agreed—that controls the meaning of legislation.” 132 F.4th 1022, 1025 (7th Cir. 2025).
Although the precise, long-term implications of Thompson are unresolved, it is notable that the opinion is consistent with the general narrowing of fraud statutes throughout the 21st century. For example, the Court took a comparable approach in Skilling v. United States, which restricted the application of the honest services fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1346, to bribery and kickback schemes, and not to undisclosed self-dealing. 561 U.S. 358, 409-11 (2010). More recently, the Court held that the right-to-control theory cannot form the basis of a conviction for wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1343, as federal fraud statutes criminalize only schemes involving deprivation of traditional property interests. Ciminelli v. United States, 598 U.S. 306 (2023). Thompson represents the latest installment in this defendant-friendly trend.