No Quid Pro Quo: Judge Dismisses Campaign-Contribution Bribery Charges Against Former NY Lieutenant Governor

• Published date: 20 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Litigation, Mediation & Arbitration, Criminal Law, Trials & Appeals & Compensation, White Collar Crime, Anti-Corruption & Fraud
• Law Firm: Arnold & Porter
• Author: Mr Murad Hussain, Marcus Asner and Michael Kim Krouse

On December 5, 2022, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed three counts of a five-count indictment against former New York Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin, holding that the prosecution's corruption charges failed to satisfy the First Amendment's heightened standard for an alleged quid pro quo involving political contributions. US District Judge J. Paul Oetken's decision was the latest in a recent string of federal rulings that have narrowed the enforcement options available to public corruption prosecutors.

Benjamin resigned from his position in April 2022, immediately after federal prosecutors charged him with diverting $50,000 in state funds to a charitable organization in return for bribes taking the form of campaign contributions. The indictment also accused Benjamin of lying to the New York City Campaign Finance Board about his Comptroller campaign and falsifying his executive appointment questionnaire in order to conceal the alleged bribery. The indictment included three bribery-related corruption charges'federal programs bribery, honest services wire fraud and conspiracy to commit those two offenses'and two charges of obstructing an investigation by falsifying records. Benjamin moved to dismiss the entire indictment.

In dismissing the bribery-related charges, Judge Oetken first reviewed Supreme Court case law on quid pro quo agreements in the context of campaign contributions. As the Supreme Court explained in the Hobbs Act extortion case of McCormick v. United States, an unlawful quid pro quo between a public official and a private citizen cannot be inferred simply from the fact that an official received a contribution and then took action favorable to the donor. See 500 U.S. 257, 272-73 (1991). In our privately-financed system of elections, political contributions are expressive and associative acts protected by the First Amendment, and people typically will donate to officials whom they expect to act favorably to their interests. Thus, to avoid criminalizing ordinary political conduct, corruption prosecutions involving political contributions must prove more than a chronological connection between contributions and official conduct. See id. at 272. As such, a political contribution only violates federal law if a contribution is made "in return for an explicit promise or undertaking by the official to perform or not to perform an official act." Id. at 273.

Like the many cases that have since applied McCormick to...