The first thing I did was determine was exactly constitutes "fraud" in legal terms. If you do this, you'll likely find some variation of this definition (from USLegal.com):
Fraud is generally defined in the law as an intentional misrepresentation of material existing fact made by one person to another with knowledge of its falsity and for the purpose of inducing the other person to act, and upon which the other person relies with resulting injury or damage.
The highlighted item in that definition is mine. I highlighted it because it undermines many of the cases that are prosecuted for "honest services fraud." In the case of a person who willfully provides misleading information to a college on an application for admissions, this begs the question: Who, exactly, has suffered some kind of injury or damage?
This is not an inconsequential point I raise. In fact, the lack of any "injury or damage" was the legal basis for the U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Alvarez, which overturned a key provision of the Stolen Valor Act of 2005. In effect, the court ruled that absent any fraud, the First Amendment protects outright lies and false claims as "speech."
As a result of this decision, the Stolen Valor Act of 2013 was passed which included a provision that stated the Act was only applicable in cases where the defendant gained something of value by fraud. The 2013 law was effectively meaningless because these cases could already be prosecuted under existing fraud statutes.
Now let's move on to "honest services fraud," which apparently involves cases where no damages of any kind actually occur.
The American Bar Association published an interesting article outlining some serious concerns about the Federal law as it is written:
Honest Services Fraud: You May Already Be Guilty!
The crux of the problem for the ABA is that the applicable Federal statute is so broad and vague that it can be used to prosecute just about anyone. They even cite a number of cases where Justice Antonin Scalia wrote at length about the dangers this statute present to Americans. The law as it is written could turn a person who lies about his birthday just to get a piece of cake and a "Happy Birthday!" serenade from the staff at a local restaurant into a felon.
This is the provision of the Federal statute that the ABA found so problematic:
For the purposes of this chapter, the term "scheme or artifice to defraud" includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.
The ABA is right. What the hell is an "intangible right of honest services?"
If you sign a contract with an agreed penulty for misrepresentation you can be liable for that—which is nothing akin to your birthday cake example.
And there are all kinds of ways a college can claim harm for signing, say, a team athlete who can’t play the sport or just any student who brings down the quality of the student body or doesn’t diversify it in some way they are seeking. A whole lot of damage from that? Probably not.
But don’t the charges in these college cases include commercial bribery that via wire communications or otherwise crossing state lines falls under federal purview? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_bribery
I might add, however, that given all the Deep State, massive crime in DC itself, I see no reason for the Feds to go trawling to this kind of backwater to prosecute, however.
It is akin to the prosecution back in the day of Martha Stewart—while the Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Mueller, Barr, etc., still all go free.