Opinion of the Court
“to wronging one in his property rights.” Cleveland, 531 U. S., at 19 (internal quotation marks omitted).[1] This understanding reflects not only the original meaning of the text, but also that the fraud statutes do not vest a general power in “the Federal Government … to enforce (its view of) integrity in broad swaths of state and local policymaking.” Kelly v. United States, 590 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (slip op., at 12). Instead, these statutes “protec[t] property rights only.” Cleveland, 531 U. S., at 19. Accordingly, the Government must prove not only that wire fraud defendants “engaged in deception,” but also that money or property was “an object of their fraud.” Kelly, 590 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 7) (alterations omitted).
Despite these limitations, lower federal courts for decades interpreted the mail and wire fraud statutes to protect intangible interests unconnected to traditional property rights. See Skilling v. United States, 561 U. S. 358, 400 (2010) (recounting how “the Courts of Appeals, one after another, interpreted the term ‘scheme or artifice to defraud’ to include deprivations not only of money or property, but also of intangible rights”). For example, federal courts held the fraud statutes reached such intangible interests as the right to “honest services,” ibid. (internal quotation marks omitted); the right of the citizenry to an honest election, see United States v. Girdner, 754 F. 2d 877, 880 (CA10 1985); and the right to privacy, United States v. Louderman, 576 F. 2d 1383, 1387 (CA9 1978). In McNally v. United States, 483 U. S. 350 (1987), this Court halted that trend by confining the federal fraud statutes to their original station, the “protect[ion of] individual property rights.” Id., at 359, n. 8. Congress then amended the fraud statutes “specifically to cover one of the ‘intangible rights’ that lower courts
- ↑ Although Cleveland involved the mail fraud statute, 18 U. S. C. §1341, “we have construed identical language in the wire and mail fraud statutes in pari materia.” Pasquantino v. United States, 544 U. S. 349, 355, n. 2 (2005).
