Opinion ID: 437447
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Remaining Objections to the Fraudulent Concealment Instructions

Text: 161 The FBI defendants challenge the trial court's failure to instruct the jury that mere silence by a defendant is not fraudulent or deliberate concealment. Brief of FBI Appellants, p. 67. They also claim as error the court's instruction that concealment for law enforcement purposes may be deemed to be fraudulent or deliberate concealment; they assert that this instruction conflicts with alleged principles that concealment by a third party may not be attributed to named defendants, and that concealment must have been wrongful. Id. According to defendants, these erroneous instructions entitle them to a new trial. We disagree. 162 First, the unrefuted evidence presented at trial made absolutely clear that the FBI conspirators here had not merely been silent, but had made affirmative misrepresentations, and had assumed false identities as protestors, students, and parade coordinators, to conceal their official status. Much as in Richards, defendants here admitted that they misrepresented their actual position and then remained silent, knowing their representations were false. On those facts, an instruction that mere silence does not constitute concealment could only have been confusing. Regardless whether a proposed instruction correctly states a legal abstraction, when the instruction is not applicable to the facts, it is properly denied. 120 163 Second, we reject both defendants' characterization of the District Court's instruction on concealment for law enforcement purposes and its challenge to that instruction. The court did not instruct that concealment for law enforcement purposes may be deemed to be fraudulent or deliberate concealment, as though all law enforcement secrecy amounted to fraudulent concealment. Rather, the court instructed that if there was deliberate concealment, it doesn't make any difference whether the defendant or conspiracy kept the material [information] from the plaintiff because the agency employing the defendant or the conspirators believed that law enforcement considerations required concealment. 121 164 Neither of defendants' challenges to this instruction warrants a new trial. For one, the instruction was not contrary to defendants' principle that concealment by a third party may not be attributed to the named defendants--assuming, arguendo, that we accept that principle. First, the instructions generally required that concealment be attributable to the defendant or, with the conspiracy claims, to the overall conspiracy; 122 and second, the particular instruction at issue addressed concealment of information by defendants because defendants' employers believed it necessary, not concealment by the employers. Nor was the instruction contrary to defendants' principle--which, again, we only accept arguendo --that concealment must be wrongful. The District Court properly noted that, as in Smith v. Nixon, 606 F.2d 1183 (D.C.Cir.1979), cert. denied, 453 U.S. 912, 101 S.Ct. 3147, 69 L.Ed.2d 997 (1981), and Fitzgerald v. Seamans --cases in which we found claims of Government secrecy to constitute adequate allegations of concealment--the wrongfulness in this case consisted of defendants' efforts to conceal COINTELPRO and the MPD activities from the public despite the unlawfulness of the FBI and MPD programs. 123 In other words, to the extent that wrongful concealment is required, it may be wrongful to devise a scheme to conceal information even if done on the belief that one's superiors believe law enforcement purposes to compel secrecy. The instruction as given did not conflict with this principle. Moreover, we suspect that this argument is but a masked effort to challenge the District Court's failure to charge that concealment must be wrongful. Since defendants did not raise this objection below, we decline to speculate further on their perceived inconsistencies between the instruction and the asserted principle. We find none and reject the claim.