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Page Number: 32

10 

SNYDER v. UNITED STATES 

JACKSON, J., dissenting 

That provision imposes criminal penalties on any bank em-
ployee who “corruptly solicits or demands . . . or corruptly
accepts or agrees to accept, anything of value from any per-
son,  intending  to  be  influenced  or  rewarded  in  connection 
with any business or transaction.” Ibid. (emphasis added); 
see also §215(a)(2).  And this similarity was no coincidence. 
The House Report the majority quotes as explicating §666 
confirms that §666 was meant to track §215—not §201(b),
as the majority claims.  See H. R. Rep. No. 99–797, at 30, 
n. 9. 

This  means,  of  course,  that  if  §215  criminalizes  gratui-
ties, it is likely §666 does as well.  But the majority labels 
§215 “a null data point,” evidently because this Court has
never  interpreted  that  statute.  Ante,  at  9,  n. 4.  Section 
215’s relevance to §666 does not come from any interpreta-
tion, however—it is plain on the face of that statute, which
uses the exact same “influenced or rewarded” phrase.  And 
the history of that model provision indicates that Congress
meant  for  §215  to  reach  gratuities,  too.    For  example,  a 
House Report directly speaks of §215 as a statute criminal-
izing  gratuities:  It  says  that,  before  1986,  §215  made  “it 
criminal for a bank official to accept any gratuity, no matter 
how trivial, after that official ha[d] taken official action on
bank  business.”  H. R.  Rep.  No.  99–335,  p. 6,  n. 25  (1985) 
(emphasis  added).    Congress  amended  §215  in  1986  to 
“narro[w]” the statute, but not by carving out gratuities al-
together.  Ibid.  Rather it narrowed the “law by requiring
that the acceptance of the gratuity be done corruptly.”  Ibid. 
(emphasis added).3  Astute readers will recall that Congress
made exactly this same narrowing edit to §666.  See supra, 

—————— 

3 Piling on, I note that the 1986 amendments to §215 also required fed-
eral agencies with responsibility for regulating a financial institution to
“establish . . . guidelines” to help bank employees comply with the stat-
ute.  See 18 U. S. C. §215(d) (1982 ed., Supp. IV).  When those agencies 
followed through, they too expressly assumed that §215 covered gratui-
ties.  See, e.g., 52 Fed. Reg. 46046 (1987); id., at 43940.