Not only did they endanger patient lives by using unready and flawed technology, they were brazen enough to lie about it in writing (in pitch decks) and on national TV (CBS This Morning and others).

By putting blatantly false claims, like “Theranos Edison devices are deployed in the backs of Humvees in Afghanistan” and “Theranos technology has been validated by Johns Hopkins”, in writing, they have made it quite easy for prosecutors to meet any mens rea bar.

That said, it’s true that historically prosecutors have used wire fraud charges as an open ended tool. In “The Chickenshit Club”, the author describes in detail how various white collar crime task forces employed US Postal Service inspectors to help build wire fraud cases. It may not be as easy as Felix Salmon is saying, but the idea that any fraud that involves a wire constitutes “wire fraud” is not that far off from federal prosecutors’ historical playbook.