## Facts

- The George Washington Bridge is operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (Port Authority) and connects Fort Lee, New Jersey, to Manhattan.
- Bridget Anne Kelly (a senior aide in the New Jersey Governor’s office) and William Baroni (a Port Authority official) arranged to realign the toll lanes leading from Fort Lee to the bridge.
- Under the realignment, Fort Lee traffic was reduced from multiple access lanes to a single lane for several days, producing major traffic delays in Fort Lee.
- The lane change was presented internally as part of a “traffic study,” but prosecutors alleged the real reason was to punish Fort Lee’s mayor for declining to support the governor’s reelection campaign.
- Carrying out the lane realignment required Port Authority personnel to perform work related to the new traffic pattern, including efforts by traffic engineers and additional time by toll-collection staff.
- Federal prosecutors charged Kelly and Baroni with wire fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1343), federal-program fraud (18 U.S.C. § 666(a)(1)(A)), and related conspiracy counts, based on the theory that they used deception to take the Port Authority’s property.
- A jury convicted Kelly and Baroni. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed, reasoning that the scheme involved obtaining Port Authority property by deception, including the bridge lanes and employee labor.
- The Supreme Court granted certiorari.

## Issues

1. Whether a politically motivated lane realignment carried out through deception constitutes a scheme to obtain “money or property” as required for wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1343.
2. Whether the same conduct constitutes federal-program fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 666(a)(1)(A) when the scheme’s aim was a regulatory decision (lane allocation) rather than obtaining money or property.
3. Whether the resulting use of Port Authority employee time and related operational costs can satisfy the statutes’ “money or property” requirement when those costs are incidental to the lane-allocation objective.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court unanimously reversed.
- The Court held that the wire-fraud and federal-program-fraud convictions could not stand because the scheme’s object was not to obtain money or property.
- The lane realignment was an abuse of regulatory authority over traffic flow, not a plan to take the Port Authority’s property within the meaning of the federal fraud statutes.
- Although employee time and labor can be property interests in some contexts, here the labor costs were implementation costs of the lane realignment and were not the object of the deception.
- The Court remanded for further proceedings consistent with its opinion.

## Legal Principles

- Federal wire fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1343) criminalizes schemes to defraud a victim of money or property; deceit without a money-or-property object is not enough.
- Federal-program fraud (18 U.S.C. § 666(a)(1)(A)) similarly requires that the defendant, by fraud, obtain or seek to obtain property from an entity receiving federal funds.
- A public official’s misuse of regulatory power—such as reallocating traffic lanes—does not become property fraud merely because the official lies about the reason for the regulatory decision.
- A conviction for property fraud cannot rest on costs that are only a byproduct of carrying out a scheme whose true aim is regulatory or political rather than acquiring money or property.
- Federal fraud statutes are not general anticorruption tools for punishing dishonest or abusive exercises of state or local authority absent the required property element.

## Conclusion

Because the Bridgegate lane-realignment plan aimed to impose a retaliatory traffic pattern (a regulatory outcome) rather than to obtain the Port Authority’s money or property, the government failed to prove the required property object for wire fraud or federal-program fraud, and the Supreme Court reversed the convictions and remanded.


Kelly v. United States, 140 S.Ct. 1565 (2020)