PUBLISH 

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS 

FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT 

_________________________________ 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

 Plaintiff - Appellee, 

v. 

JULIEANN LOGSDON, 

 Defendant - Appellant. 

No. 19-7055 

_________________________________ 

Appeal from the United States District Court 

for the Eastern District of Oklahoma 

(D.C. No. 6:19-CR-00023-RAW-1)

_________________________________ 

Gary L. Davis, II, Gary Davis Law Group, Tulsa, Oklahoma, for Defendant-Appellant. 

Linda A. Epperley, Assistant United States Attorney (Brian J. Kuester, United States 

Attorney, and Gregory Dean Burris, Assistant United States Attorney, with her on the 

brief), Office of the United States Attorney, Muskogee, Oklahoma, for Plaintiff-Appellee. 

_________________________________ 

Before McHUGH, EBEL, and EID, Circuit Judges. 

_________________________________ 

EID, Circuit Judge. 

_________________________________ 

Defendant-Appellant Julieann Logsdon pleaded guilty to making a false 

statement in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001. She made the statement, which 

concerned her whereabouts and activities on the night of a suspected arson, to a 

federal agent investigating that arson. At sentencing, the district court applied a 

FILED 

United States Court of Appeals 

Tenth Circuit 

February 28, 2022

Christopher M. Wolpert 

Clerk of Court

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cross-reference that increases the Sentencing Guidelines’ advisory range where “the 

offense involved arson.” U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1(c)(2). Logsdon challenges the 

application of the cross-reference. Exercising jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 

and 18 U.S.C. § 3742, we affirm. 

I. 

 Mail-Mart is a mail and shipping business in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. On the 

morning of August 26, 2017, Sarah Hicks, an employee of Mail-Mart, arrived to open 

the store and discovered that a fire had occurred. Hicks reported the fire and 

Tahlequah officials called in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and 

Explosives (“ATF”). ATF Special Agent Ashley Stephens determined that the fire 

was an arson and opened an investigation. 

 All Mail-Mart employees, including Julieann Logsdon, were interviewed as 

part of the investigation. At the start of their interview on August 29, 2017, Agent 

Stephens told Logsdon that he was investigating the Mail-Mart fire. Logsdon 

confirmed that she understood the purpose of the interview. She told Agent Stephens 

that she left Mail-Mart around 4:30 p.m. on the date of the fire but returned around 

9:00 p.m. She explained that she and her husband were on their way to Tulsa, 

Oklahoma, when they realized she did not have her debit card. She claimed that they 

drove back to Tahlequah to look for the card, first unsuccessfully searching her 

home, and then checking Mail-Mart. She estimated arriving at Mail-Mart around 

9:00 p.m. and said she reset the alarm before leaving. 

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 Investigators disproved Logsdon’s story when they compared Mail-Mart’s 

alarm records with her cell phone records. The alarm records revealed that MailMart’s alarm was deactivated at 9:33 p.m. But Logsdon’s phone records placed her 

in the Tulsa area at around 9:45 p.m., when the owner of Mail-Mart called her. Tulsa 

is over sixty miles from Tahlequah, so it would have been impossible for Logsdon to 

deactivate an alarm at 9:33 p.m. in Tahlequah and take a call in Tulsa twelve minutes 

later. 

 Logsdon was interviewed again on September 21, 2017. After waiving her 

Miranda rights, she repeated the substance of her initial statement but admitted the 

twelve minutes between the time shown on the alarm records and the time shown on 

the phone records would not be enough time to travel to Tulsa. She attempted to 

reconcile the 9:33 p.m. alarm deactivation with her original narrative by stating that 

the alarm might not have beeped when she went into Mail-Mart. Logsdon avoided 

further questioning about the alarm and requested an attorney. 

 On February 13, 2019, Logsdon was charged with making a false statement in 

violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001. Her indictment stated that she “claim[ed] she entered 

the Mail[-]Mart and turned off the alarm, at a specific date and time,” when she 

“knew” that “she did not enter the Mail[-]Mart and did not turn off the alarm at that 

time.” App’x Vol. I at 9. Logsdon entered a guilty plea on April 1, 2019. She told 

the magistrate judge that she had “made a false statement to an ATF agent that was 

material in his investigation.” Id. at 43–44. The Presentence Report (“PSR”) 

calculated Logsdon’s offense level at 24 after applying a Federal Sentencing 

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Guidelines (“Guidelines”) cross-reference for an “offense [that] involved arson.” 

U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1(c)(2); see also id. § 2K1.4(a)(1). 

After credit for acceptance of responsibility, the PSR reduced Logsdon’s 

offense level to 21 and calculated a Guidelines range of 37–46 months of 

imprisonment. Logsdon moved for a variance, which the district court partially 

granted. The court sentenced her to eighteen months of imprisonment followed by 

two years of supervised release.1 At the sentencing hearing, the court upheld the 

application of the arson cross-reference in the PSR, explaining that the Mail-Mart fire 

“was an arson, [and Logsdon] knew it was being investigated as an arson at the time 

she made her false statement.” App’x Vol. I at 75. 

 Logsdon appeals the application of the cross-reference. She argues that her 

false statement offense did not involve arson because there was no evidence tying her 

to the arson under investigation and her statement did not mention, let alone cause, 

arson. If we agree that the cross-reference was improperly applied, she argues that 

the government should be barred from introducing new evidence on remand. We do 

not reach that issue because we affirm the application of the cross-reference and, with 

it, Logsdon’s sentence. 

1

 Although Logsdon is no longer incarcerated, her supervised release is 

ongoing, so this appeal is not moot. See United States v. Montgomery, 550 F.3d 

1229, 1231 n.1 (10th Cir. 2008). 

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II. 

 The applicable provision of the Guidelines for a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001 

is § 2B1.1. It instructs courts to apply a cross-reference under § 2K1.4 “[i]f the 

offense involved arson.” U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1(c)(2). The effect is a base offense level 

of 24. See id. § 2K1.4(a)(1). 

 Logsdon contends that the cross-reference does not apply to her false 

statement in the Mail-Mart investigation because she did not mention arson and there 

was no evidence that she was involved in the arson under investigation. She asks us 

to hold that making a false statement during an arson investigation is insufficient to 

trigger the cross-reference. To assess these arguments, we must interpret the phrase 

“offense involved arson,” as it appears in the Guidelines. That is a question of law 

reviewed de novo. See United States v. Maldonado-Passage, 4 F.4th 1097, 1103 

(10th Cir. 2021). “We interpret the Sentencing Guidelines according to accepted 

rules of statutory construction.” United States v. Sweargin, 935 F.3d 1116, 1120 

(10th Cir. 2019) (quoting United States v. Robertson, 350 F.3d 1109, 1112 (10th Cir. 

2003)). “When interpreting a guideline, we look not only to the language in the 

guideline itself, but also to the Sentencing Commission’s interpretive and 

explanatory commentary to the guideline.” Id. at 1120–21. 

III. 

To assess whether the district court properly applied the arson cross-reference, 

we will consider what each word in the provision that invokes it—“offense,” 

“involved,” and “arson”—means in light of the Guidelines, our jurisprudence, and 

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Logsdon’s false statement offense. The Guidelines’ commentary defines “offense” 

as “the offense of conviction and all relevant conduct under § 1B1.3 (Relevant 

Conduct) unless a different meaning is specified or is otherwise clear from the 

context.” U.S.S.G. § 1B1.1 cmt. 1(I). No other meaning is apparent in the other 

applicable Guidelines provisions, so this definition controls. See id. §§ 2B1.1, 

2K1.4. Logsdon’s “offense of conviction” falls under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 which, as 

relevant here, criminalizes “mak[ing] any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent 

statement or representation” in a “matter within the jurisdiction of the executive . . . 

branch.” 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(2) (emphasis added). Relevant conduct includes, in 

part, (1) “all acts and omissions committed, aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, 

induced, procured, or willfully caused by the defendant” and (2) “all harm that 

resulted from the acts and omissions . . . and all harm that was the object of such acts 

and omissions.” U.S.S.G. § 1B1.3(a). That means we consider the specific factual 

circumstances surrounding Logsdon’s false statement for purposes of evaluating 

whether her offense involved arson. See Witte v. United States, 515 U.S. 389, 393 

(1995) (“Under the Sentencing Guidelines, the sentencing range for a particular 

offense is determined on the basis of all ‘relevant conduct’ in which the defendant 

was engaged and not just with regard to the conduct underlying the offense of 

conviction.”). By using the word “offense,” Guidelines provisions like the one at 

issue here instruct courts familiar with a case’s factual background to assess whether 

the statutory crime, as committed by the defendant, implicates a given crossreference. See id.

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Next, the meaning of “arson” is not contested here. The district court found by 

a preponderance of the evidence that the Mail-Mart fire was an arson. More 

importantly, Logsdon does not challenge the district court’s conclusion that she knew 

the fire was being investigated as an arson when Agent Stephens interviewed her and 

she made the false statement charged in her indictment. See Oral Arg. at 7:47–8:00. 

Finally, the Guidelines do not define the word “involved,” so we turn to its 

plain meaning. See United States v. Archuleta, 865 F.3d 1280, 1287 (10th Cir. 2017). 

As Logsdon points out, however, we have been down this road before. In United 

States v. Montgomery, 468 F.3d 715 (10th Cir. 2006), we interpreted the word 

“involving,” which appeared in a criminal statute imposing a mandatory minimum 

sentence for “violation[s] . . . involving . . . 100 or more marihuana plants.” See 21 

U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(B)(vii). We see no reason to depart from the meaning of 

“involving” we adopted in Montgomery.

2

In Montgomery, DEA agents found ninety-nine marijuana plants in one room 

of the defendant’s residence and two “mother plants” in another room. 468 F.3d at 

717. Mother plants, we explained, are “mature marijuana plant[s] used to produce 

clippings that are put in a fertilized solution in the hope that they will subsequently 

sprout roots and become new marijuana plants.” Id. The offense charged in 

2

 The government acknowledges Montgomery, but devotes more of its brief to 

decisions interpreting the phrase “involved in.” We think such a focus is misplaced. 

The only difference between “involving” (Montgomery) and “involved” (this case) is 

verb tense. Both words share the same root. See Montgomery, 468 F.3d at 720 

(“‘Involves’ or ‘involving’ are merely inflected forms of the word ‘involve’ and do 

not vary from the root in core meaning.”). 

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Montgomery was possessing a controlled substance with intent to distribute, and 

federal law imposed a mandatory minimum sentence for a “violation . . . involving 

. . . 100 or more marihuana plants.” 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(B)(vii). The issue was 

whether the defendant’s operation “involved” the two mother plants. That would 

bring the total to 101 and trigger the mandatory minimum sentence. 

We surveyed dictionary definitions and assessed the “common meaning” of the 

word “involve” to reason that the mandatory minimum sentence applied “when the 

predicate violation . . . has as a part or includes, 100 or more marijuana plants.” 

Montgomery, 468 F.3d at 720 (emphasis added). The mother plants were “a part of” 

the predicate distribution offense because, although they were not directly 

distributed, the evidence suggested that they enabled the growth of plants that were 

distributed. Id. at 721. We described the dynamic as akin to “but for” causation: 

“[b]ut for the mother plants, some, if not all, of the 99 other plants would not exist 

. . . [and] Montgomery would not have possessed with intent to distribute, 

marijuana.” Id. All three elements of the relationship set out in the statute—the 

predicate “violation,” the plants themselves, and the “involving” connector—were 

critical to applying it to the facts of the case. The same is true here, and it leads us to 

conclude that Logsdon’s material false statement in an arson investigation involved 

arson. 

The predicate term “offense,” defined broadly in the Guidelines as discussed 

above, dictates the nature and range of the activities that we consider for arson 

involvement. Under Montgomery, the “involved” connector complements this broad 

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array of conduct by setting a relatively low bar for the level of arson connection that 

is required to apply the cross-reference. It follows that an offense involves arson 

under the Guidelines where it merely “has as a part or includes” arson. See id. at 

720. Here, arson was “a part of” the false statement offense, within the meaning of 

Montgomery, because Logsdon made her false statement to an arson investigator, and 

it concerned her activities on the night of the arson under investigation. The 

underlying arson was at the statement’s conceptual core. Just as the mother plants 

were part of the statutory violation in Montgomery because they contributed to the 

defendant’s criminal conduct, arson is part of the offense in this case because 

Logsdon’s false statement can only be understood with reference to the ongoing 

arson investigation it obstructed. Without the arson, the statement would not have 

been made, let alone recorded, let alone prosecuted. The district court’s application 

of the arson cross-reference was proper because arson was a critical part of 

Logsdon’s 18 U.S.C. § 1001 offense.3

Reading the Guidelines together with 18 U.S.C. § 1001, we think almost every 

false statement uttered to an arson investigator and successfully prosecuted 

implicates the cross-reference. That is because the question of the cross-reference’s 

application only arises at sentencing, once there is an underlying conviction for the 

3

 Logsdon’s offense “includes” arson—the other meaning of “involve” 

surveyed in Montgomery—for much the same reason. We have declined to hold that 

the word “involve” requires one thing to be literally included within another. See 

Scalia v. Wynnewood Ref. Co., LLC, 978 F.3d 1175, 1182 (10th Cir. 2020) (holding 

that a vessel need not “contain” a hazardous chemical to be part of a process 

“involving” a hazardous chemical). 

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false statement. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, a prosecution for a false statement requires 

the government to prove that the defendant’s falsehood was “material[]” in the 

context of a “matter” within the federal government’s jurisdiction. Where that 

“matter” is an arson investigation, such as the Mail-Mart inquiry conducted by Agent 

Stephens, a conviction thus requires the false statement to have been material to the 

arson investigation. If that is the case, we think the cross-reference naturally applies 

to a defendant’s conduct. In other words, a false statement in an arson investigation 

successfully prosecuted under § 1001 will typically involve arson because the 

statement was necessarily material to the investigation of the arson. Here, for 

example, Logsdon’s false statement materially misinformed Agent Stephens by 

placing her in Mail-Mart on the night of the fire when she was in another city 

entirely. Section 1001’s materiality requirement means that arson is almost always a 

necessary part of a false statement in an arson investigation. 

The analogy to “but for” causation from Montgomery is also instructive. In 

that case, we counted mother plants toward the marijuana plant total because some or 

all of the other ninety-nine plants could not have been grown without them. That 

meant the offense involved the mother plants, even if they were not the particular 

plants being possessed by the defendant with intent to distribute. The same is true 

here, in terms of the relationship between the Mail-Mart arson and Logsdon’s false 

statement. Logsdon’s false statement was only made because Agent Stephens was 

investigating the cause of the Mail-Mart fire: arson. And Logsdon’s false statement 

was only prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 because it was material to a matter 

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within the ATF’s jurisdiction: arson. Arson both launched the investigation in which 

Logsdon made the false statement and, by rendering the statement material, sustained 

Logsdon’s subsequent prosecution for making the statement. But for the underlying 

arson, the statement would not have been made and the prosecution would not have 

occurred. For these reasons, we hold that Logsdon’s false statement offense involved 

arson and the district court correctly applied the arson cross-reference. 

We reject Logsdon’s argument that the cross-reference only applies if she was 

involved in committing arson. Logsdon cites to United States v. Johnson, where, 

although the defendant was not convicted of arson, the Ninth Circuit concluded that 

there was enough evidence to sustain the district court’s finding, for sentencing 

purposes, that he had committed arson. 782 F. App’x 568, 570–71 (9th Cir. 2019) 

(unpublished). Our decision today is not in tension with Johnson. That case simply 

illustrates how a district court may validly consider whether a defendant was 

involved in committing arson when evaluating the cross-reference’s application. In 

other words, there is no requirement that a defendant commit arson for the crossreference to apply. Committing arson is sufficient, but not necessary, to invoke the 

cross-reference. The same is true of advancing a material falsehood in an arson 

investigation. 

Finally, we reject Logsdon’s argument that the cross-reference cannot apply 

here because her statement did not mention arson on its face. That contention is 

inconsistent with the language of the Guidelines. Nothing in § 2B1.1 requires that a 

false statement expressly reference arson. To apply the cross-reference, a statement 

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must only “involve” arson. Viewing Logsdon’s conduct in context makes clear how 

arson played a substantial part in her false statement. 

IV. 

For the reasons stated above, we AFFIRM the district court’s application of 

the arson cross-reference to Logsdon’s sentence. As a result, we AFFIRM Logsdon’s 

sentence and do not reach the second issue Logsdon presents concerning the scope of 

remand. 

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