Veteran prosecutor Rebecca Schuman joins OPIA in senior post

Rebecca Moses Schuman, a veteran federal prosecutor, joined the New Jersey attorney general’s office last month to lead its anti-corruption efforts as director of the corruption bureau at the Office of Public Integrity and Accountability.

A spokesperson said Schuman’s appointment comes “as the attorney general finalizes a restructuring of the department’s criminal offices.”

“She brings a wealth of experience and a new perspective to the state’s corruption work,” the spokesperson said.

Schuman said she was “thrilled for the opportunity to work with these dedicated prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and staff to investigate and prosecute public corruption across my home state.”

Attorney General Jennifer Davemport has not yet announced her plans to reform the embattled OPIA, but the hiring of Schuman is one of several recent signals that changes are underway.

Schuman replaces Jeffrey Manis, who was reassigned to a seemingly lesser position as the state’s deputy insurance fraud prosecutor.  Deputy First Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Kormann quietly resigned this month; he had been assigned as the interim head of the OPIA in April after Eric Gibson, the lead prosecutor in the state’s case against Democratic powerbroker George Norcross, resigned.   Kormann has joined Dughi, Hewit and Domalewski as a partner in its criminal defense and government investigations practice.

The future of Assistant Attorney General Andrew Wellbrock remains unclear.  He was the lead prosecutor in the state’s unsuccessful case against George Norcross, a Democratic powerbroker; since Kormann’s abrupt departure, Wellbrock is operationally in charge of the OPIA.

A graduate of Georgetown University and Harvard Law School, Schuman was a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2016 to 2022 and an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York from 2022 until last May.

Schuman returns to her home state of New Jersey with a long list of wins – something the OPIA had been lacking since its start in 2018.

She prosecuted Carla Sena, a former procurement officer at Sandia National Laboratories who admitted to running a bid-rigging scheme through a shell company she secretly controlled to win a moving-services contract with the U.S. Department of Energy. Sena was sentenced to three years in prison.  She also contributed to the successful prosecution of three men who pleaded guilty to a $3.5 million scheme to solicit contributions to a sham political action committee that was falsely connected to 2016 presidential candidates.

Schuman also prosecuted two brothers charged with running “247TVStream,” an illegal streaming site that collected more than $7 million in subscriber fees and allegedly caused over $100 million in harm to copyright holders, and Russell Ware, a former Department of Veterans Affairs official who admitted to stealing VA disability benefits by wiring payments — made out in the names of legitimate veteran beneficiaries — into his own bank account.

She was also the lead prosecutor in the guilty plea of Nikolay Grigorev, who admitted to smuggling sensitive drone technology to Russian companies to procure sanctioned dual-use electronics for Russian entities tied to drone manufacturing for the war in Ukraine.

Some prosecutions led by Schuman in New York are still pending Dao Yin, a candidate for the New York State Assembly in 2024, who allegedly faked campaign contributions to receive over $160,000 in public matching funds; and a wire fraud conspiracy charge against Harold King, a former Brooklyn judge.