A bunch of people e-mailed me to say that surely forging a letter from a military officer, which ostensibly came from a military file, must violate some federal statute, and not just the couple of state election law statutes I mentioned here. Well, that was my intuition, too, but a quick search didn’t reveal any such general statutes. Federal forgery law is a set of specific prohibitions on forging specific kinds of documents, and I couldn’t find anything that would cover this sort of letter. Likewise, prohibitions on fraud generally involve fraud intended to get something of value from someone, but not including their opinions or their votes.
I may well have missed something — I’m not a specialist on forgery and fraud laws, and my searches were cursory. If you find a statute that would cover this, please e-mail me its citation and its text, and if it pans out, I’ll gladly blog about it. But for now, I don’t see it; I only see the two state misdemeanor statutes, focused on false statements aimed at affecting elections.
UPDATE: A couple of people suggest that 18 U.S.C. sec. 1001 might apply here; this is the general federal false statement statute, which provides (in most relevant part),
Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully —
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
As best I can tell, though, “in any matter within the jurisdiction” has been read to refer to any statement made to the government. I don’t think that making a false writing thats purport to be a statement by the government qualifies; none of the sec. 1001 cases that I’ve seen fit that mold. If anyone is aware of any cases involving such a use of sec. 1001, please let me know.
Others suggested that the mail fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. sec. 1341, might cover this (if some part of the scheme was carried out through the mails or through some interstate carrier). But as best I can tell, while sec. 1341 prohibits false statements used to “defraud,” that term has been read as limited to cheating people out of their property or other similarly valuable things. Lying to people to get them simply to believe something, or to vote a certain way has generally not been treated as fraud for legal purposes.
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