I am not a lawyer, but I find certain legal questions fascinating. Take the example of former Nebraska congressman Jeff Fortenberry who just had his convictions for lying to the FBI thrown out by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The background is that during a fundraiser for Fortenberry held in 2016 at the Los Angeles home of Dr. Elias Ayoub, large sums were donated through straw donors from Nigerian-born French billionaire Gilbert Chagoury. This chicanery came about in an interesting way.

The congressman and Chagoury, who is of Christian-Lebanese descent, became acquainted because they are both deeply involved in advocating for persecuted Christians in the Middle East. In 2014, Chagoury funded the inaugural summit of In Defense of Christians, a Washington-based nonprofit, where Fortenberry was one of the speakers. Ayoub, who also is a Christian originally from Lebanon, served on the organization’s board and testified that he first met Fortenberry at the 2014 event.

In 2015, the founder and former president of In Defense of Christians, Toufic Baaklini, asked Ayoub to host a fundraiser for Fortenberry in LA because “he’s a very good man,” Ayoub told the jurors.

In 2018, Chagoury resolved a federal investigation accusing him of  conspiring to violate federal election laws by making illegal campaign contributions to U.S. presidential and congressional candidates, including Mitt Romney and Fortenberry. Also in 2018, Dr. Ayoub, who was cooperating in the investigation, placed a call to Fortenberry in which he explained the whole straw donor plot from the 2016 fundraiser. The FBI was recording.

Then in 2019, the FBI came to visit Fortenberry at his Nebraska home. When they asked about the straw donor plot and Gilbert Chagoury, Fortenberry played dumb. He did the same during a follow-up conversation in Washington DC. For this he was indicted and convicted in a Los Angeles courtroom.

The convictions were thrown out because the crimes charged did not occur in Los Angeles but rather in Nebraska and Washington DC. This is in spite of a district court judge previously ruling that charging in Los Angeles was permissible because Fortenberry’s lies impacted their investigation of the fundraiser.

Now I certainly understand the principle here, that you should be charged where the crime occurred. But I find this ruling surprising nonetheless. After all, if you’re investigating crimes that occurred in Los Angeles, in this case illegal straw donations at a fundraiser, then you’re going to want to convene the grand jury in Los Angeles. And if you have to question the congressman in question and he doesn’t regularly visit Los Angeles, then you’re going to do it where he lives or where he works, which is precisely what the FBI did. And if he lies in those interviews and obstructs your investigation, that seems like it ties right back to Los Angeles.

Why should the Justice Department have to convene a new grand jury to charge Fortenberry? And should they convene two more, one for the lies told in Nebraska and another for the lies told in Washington DC? This just seems unwieldy.

We’ve seen similar questions come up about where to charge Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. Jack Smith chose the harder route of charging the case in Florida precisely to avoid having the case thrown out later for being brought in the wrong venue, but a good amount of the alleged criminal activity took place in Washington DC, including at the White House and the National Archives.

In the end, Fortenberry had to resign from Congress but otherwise received a two-year probation slap on the wrist. I have no idea if the DOJ will retry him, but it seems like flogging a dead horse at this point. It’s just hard to believe that the DOJ could have screwed up this badly, but then I think the 9th Circuit’s ruling is stupid.

But what do I know? It’s not like I went to law school.