# Honest Services Fraud **Honest services fraud** is the theory, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 1346, that a scheme to defraud includes depriving the public — or an employer — of "the intangible right of honest services." Congress enacted § 1346 in 1988 to restore a doctrine the [[Supreme Court of the United States]] had struck down in *McNally v. United States* (1987), and for two decades it was federal prosecutors' most flexible public-corruption tool. The Court narrowed it in *Skilling v. United States* (2010), holding that § 1346 reaches only bribery and kickback schemes — not undisclosed self-dealing or conflicts of interest. [[McDonnell v. United States]] (2016) then narrowed the underlying definition of an "official act," further shrinking what a bribery-only theory can charge. The two rulings together are why the vault treats the shrinking of federal corruption law as a deliberate, decades-long project rather than a series of technical adjustments: the statutes that once reached self-dealing now reach only the explicit exchange, and the explicit exchange is the one thing sophisticated actors never put in writing. See [[Elite Impunity]] and [[Fraud Enforcement Inversion]]. This is a stub — expand with the McNally/Skilling/McDonnell sequence in full, and the post-2016 charging record of the [[Public Integrity Section]]. ## See Also - [[Bribery]] - [[McDonnell v. United States]] - [[Elite Impunity]] - [[Public Integrity Section]] - [[Corruption]]