Misuse of funds cited in ouster of prosecutor Misuse of fraud funds led AG to take over Warren County Prosecutor's Office, report says

Last week's surprise ouster of Warren County Prosecutor James Pfeiffer capped a two-year state probe into allegations that the prosecutor and his staff mismanaged money meant for insurance fraud investigations, according to a report from the Attorney General's Office.

Pfeiffer, who has held the post since November 2021, resigned Friday after Attorney General Matt Platkin announced he had assumed control of the office and appointed Anthony Picione as acting county prosecutor. Picione is a veteran state prosecutor who since 2020 has been deputy director of Platkin's public integrity and accountability office, which handled the investigation.

The probe that prompted Pfeiffer's departure started after several higher-ups in his office alerted the Attorney General's Office that they suspected their colleagues were misusing money distributed by the state insurance fraud prosecutor's office, which Platkin oversees.

Investigators eventually determined a now-retired sergeant inflated the hours that the office supposedly worked on fraud cases in order to secure more grant funds, according to the report.

Investigators discovered the alleged deceit after secretly recording the sergeant's conversations with other staff. In one recording, the sergeant assured colleagues they could check a camera feed on their computers "and if they checked it for ten or fifteen minutes it would count for their day," the report says.

"No one is gonna question downtown what we're doing, ok? Nobody ... It's to bring the money in, that's all," the sergeant said on the recordings, according to the report. "They don't have to work the hours. They have to be available the hours ... no county has that much insurance fraud that they need two f-ing guys, ok? Two or three guys. They don't. But they take the grant and say to the guy, ok, you're - you're assigned to insurance fraud, but you do other jobs too."

Investigators found the county submitted paperwork in 2021 indicating a detective completed 121.88 hours of insurance fraud work even though his time sheet showed only 13.5 hours of work, according to the report.

The office collected over $500,000 in state funds specifically to investigate fraud between 2019 and 2021, according to the report.

Investigators also determined Pfeiffer and other officials tried to learn the identity of their office's whistleblowers and offered inconsistent statements "that seem to indicate a concerted effort to thwart an accurate telling of issues directly related to this investigation."

Before he became county prosecutor, Pfeiffer had a general practice law firm in Phillipsburg and in Easton, Pennsylvania, and served a brief stint from 2005 to 2007 as a state Superior Court judge in the vicinage serving Hunterdon, Somerset, and Warren counties.

This story first appeared on the New Jersey Monitor.