The Congressman on the Line

A man was accused of telephoning a leading New York banking house and a major steel corporation while pretending to be a sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives, with intent to defraud both firms. He was prosecuted in federal court in New York for falsely pretending to be an officer of the United States government. The defence argued that the indictment charged no federal crime at all, because a member of Congress is not an 'officer' of the United States in the constitutional sense, that it failed to spell out the intended fraud, and that it did not properly show where the crime took place.