Cite as: 526 U. S. 398 (1999)
Syllabus
official act of whatever identity." The statute's insistence upon an "official act," carefully defined (in § 201(a)(3)), seems pregnant with the requirement that some particular official act be identified and proved. The Government's alternative reading would produce peculiar results, criminalizing, e. g., token gifts to the President based on his official position and not linked to any identifiable act—such as the replica jerseys given by championship sports teams each year during ceremonial White House visits. Although, under the more narrow interpretation, the jerseys could be regarded as having been conferred (perhaps principally) "for or because of" the official act of receiving sports teams at the White House, such receipt—while assuredly an "official act" in some sense—is not an "action on [a] matter . . . before any public official, in [his] official capacity, or in [his] place of trust or profit" within the meaning of the § 201(a)(3) definition. The Government's insistence that its interpretation is the only one that gives effect to § 201(c)(1)(A)'s forward-looking prohibition on gratuities to selectees for federal office is rejected because the section can readily be applied to such persons even under the more narrow interpretation. Pp. 404-408.
2. The Court's holding is supported by the fact that when Congress has wanted to adopt a broadly prophylactic criminal prohibition upon gift giving, it has done so in a more precise and more administrable fashion. See, e. g., § 209(a). Finally, a narrow, rather than a sweeping, prohibition is more compatible with the fact that § 201(c)(1)(A) is merely one strand of an intricate web of regulations, both administrative and criminal, governing the acceptance of gifts and other self-enriching actions by public officials. Because this is an area where precisely targeted prohibitions are commonplace, and where more general prohibitions have been qualified by numerous exceptions, a statute that can linguistically be interpreted to be either a meat axe or a scalpel should reasonably be taken to be the latter. Pp. 408-412.
3. The Court rejects the Government's contention that the District Court's mistaken instructions concerning § 201(c)(1)(A)'s scope—which essentially and incorrectly substituted the term "official position" for "official act"—constituted harmless error. The Government's argument that the jury's verdict rendered pursuant to the instructions necessarily included a finding that respondent's gratuities were given and received "for or because of" official acts is but a restatement of the same flawed premise that permeated the instructions themselves and that the Court has herein rejected. Pp. 412-414.
138 F. 3d 961, affirmed.
Scalia, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.
399
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