412
Opinion of the Court
source in a calendar year, see 5 CFR § 2635.204(a) (1999), and for certain public-service or achievement awards and honorary degrees, see § 2635.204(d). We are frankly not sure that even our more narrow interpretation of 18 U. S. C. § 201(c)(1)(B) will cause OGE's assurance of nonviolation if the regulation is complied with to be entirely accurate; but the misdirection, if any, will be infinitely less.
More important for present purposes, however, this regulation, and the numerous other regulations and statutes littering this field, demonstrate that this is an area where precisely targeted prohibitions are commonplace, and where more general prohibitions have been qualified by numerous exceptions. Given that reality, a statute in this field that can linguistically be interpreted to be either a meat axe or a scalpel should reasonably be taken to be the latter. Absent a text that clearly requires it, we ought not expand this one piece of the regulatory puzzle so dramatically as to make many other pieces misfits. As discussed earlier, not only does the text here not require that result; its more natural reading forbids it.
III
As an alternative means of preserving the jury's verdict on Count One, the Government contends that the District Court's mistaken instruction concerning the scope of § 201(c)(1)(A) constituted harmless error. As described earlier, the District Court twice read the text of §§ 201(c)(1)(A) and 201(a)(3), but it then incorrectly explained the meaning of that statutory language by essentially substituting the term "official position" for "official act." More specifically, the court instructed the jury as follows:
"The essence of the crime is the official's position [as] the receiver of the payment not whether the official agrees to do anything in particular, that is, not whether the official agrees to do any particular official act in return. Therefore . . . to prove that a gratuity offense
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