We will hear argument this morning in case 235572, Fisher v. United States.

Mr. Green.

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court, Congress enacted 1512C in 2002 in the wake of the

large-scale destruction of Enron's financial documents.

The statute, therefore, prohibits the impairment of the

integrity or availability of information and evidence to be used in a proceeding. In 2002,

Congress hedged a little bit and added Section C2 to cover other forms of impairment, the known unknowns, so to speak.

It was, after all, the dawn of the information age.

Until the January 6th prosecutions, Section 1512C2, the otherwise provision,

had never been used to prosecute anything other than evidence

tampering. And that was for good reason. This Court has said that otherwise, when used in a

criminal statute, means to do similar conduct in a different way. The government would have you

ignore all that or disregard all that and instead convert C2

from a catch-all provision into a dragnet. One of the things that that dragnet would cover is

section C-1. Our construction of the statute at least leaves C-1 and C C2 to do some independent work.

The January 6th prosecutions demonstrate that there are a host of felony and misdemeanor crimes

that cover the alleged conduct.

A Sarbanes-Oxley-based, Enron-driven, evidence- tampering statute is not one of them. I welcome the Court's

questions.

Mr. Green, how do we determine what these two provisions have in common? Do we look after the

otherwise or before before and why?

You look at before, Justice Thomas, and you look at the kinds of manner in which documents

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