The US Supreme Court on Thursday overturned an obstruction conviction of a former Twitter employee accused of spying for Saudi Arabia, ruling that he was tried in the wrong state for knowingly falsifying a document to impede an FBI investigation.
The justices unanimously decided that the US Justice Department wrongly secured Ahmad Abouammo's conviction in California in 2022, when his only interactions with FBI agents occurred at his home in Seattle, Washington state.
Liberal-leaning Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court, explained that while the offense of falsifying a document to impede an investigation is relatively easy to prove, the law restricts where a prosecution can take place for that charge.
“The trial for falsifying a document must take place where the defendant falsified the document,” Kagan wrote. “Here that was in Seattle – meaning in venue terms, the western district of Washington.”
The ruling did not affect other criminal counts for which Abouammo was convicted, including acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government and committing wire and honest services fraud.
Abouammo, 47, was released from prison in June 2025 while the appeal was pending, after initially being sentenced to 3.5 years in custody.
Tobias Loss-Eaton, a lawyer for Abouammo, declined to comment. Representatives for the US attorney's office for the northern district of California, which tried the case, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Abouammo worked at Twitter from 2013 to 2015, before the platform was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk and renamed X, serving as media partnerships manager for the Middle East and North Africa region.
According to prosecutors, Abouammo provided confidential information to a Saudi official about two Saudi dissidents posting on Twitter in exchange for a watch worth $42,000 and two wire transfers of $100,000 each.
Abouammo later moved to Seattle and started a social media consulting company. When two San Francisco-based FBI agents flew to Seattle to interview him at his home, he denied giving the Saudi official confidential information and claimed the payments were for consulting work.
When agents requested documents to support his story, Abouammo created a fake invoice that he emailed to one of them, leading to the obstruction charge, prosecutors said.
