Opinion ID: 185504
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Smith's Conviction under 18 U.S.C. 208(a)

Text: 9 In pertinent part, the federal conflict-of-interest statute, 18 U.S.C. 208(a), forbids any officer or employee of the District of Columbia from participating 10 personally and substantially as a Government officer or employee, through decision, approval, disapproval, recommendation, the rendering of advice, investigation, or otherwise, in a ... particular matter in which, to his knowledge, he, his spouse, minor child, general partner, organization in which he is serving as officer, director, trustee, general partner, or employee, or any person or organization with whom he is negotiating or has any arrangement concerning prospective employment, has a financial interest ... 11 Smith argues that his conviction under this provision should be held invalid, as a matter of law, because he -- a government worker paid only at the rate of GS-12 -- could not have been an officer or employee who participated personally and substantially in the decisions that gave rise to his prosecution. His basis for advancing this interpretation is a provision in the D.C. Code that, in the name of avoiding conflicts of interest, requires any public official to make certain financial disclosures. See D.C. CODE 1-1461(i)(1). The linchpin of Smith's claim is that this requirement extends only to those officials paid at GS-13 or above. Id. at 1-1462(a). Because he fails to meet this local law threshold, Smith asserts, he cannot be convicted under the analogous federal statute. 12 To state this argument is, in some sense, to refute it. In the first place, the operative term in 18 U.S.C. 208(a) is not public official, as it is in the D.C. Code, but rather officer or employee. It is perfectly obvious, and Smith does not and indeed could not contest, that he was an employee of the District of Columbia when he served as MRDDA's Chief of Day Programs. Thus, the plain language of the statute, in which we find no ambiguity relevant here, sweeps Smith within its ambit. Moreover, even if there were some confusion over the scope of this text, it would make little sense for this court to interpret a term in the federal statute applicable here by reference to a different term in an unrelated non-federal statute. This is especially so given that in 18 U.S.C. 201(a)(1), which is a related federal statute, the phrase officer or employee is enlisted to help construe the very term, public official, that Smith now urges this court to use to define officer and employee. Smith has thus unpersuasively attempted to reverse the interpretive chain; in Title 18, officer and employee defines public official, and not vice versa. Finally, 208(a) was intended, and has generally been interpreted to have a broad reach, to cover all that a commonsense reading of its language would suggest. See United States v. Conlon, 202 U.S. App. D.C. 150, 628 F.2d 150, 154-55 (D.C. Cir. 1980). Smith's novel statutory construction argument must therefore be rejected, and his conviction affirmed.