Mayor Zohran Mamdani nominated on Thursday former federal prosecutor Nadia Shihata to serve as the city’s top anti-corruption watchdog, leading the Department of Investigation.
Shihata, a top assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York for more than a decade, led the team who brought down R&B singer R. Kelly on racketeering charges in 2021.
During her tenure with the U.S. attorney’s office, she served mostly as first deputy chief and then chief of the organized crime and gang section, the division that brought an innovative case against Kelly over years of allegations that he’d sexually abused several women, in some cases minors.
The case, which received international attention due to the defendant’s fame, resulted in his conviction and a prison sentence of up to 360 months.
Shihata has appeared as a legal expert on TV news shows and has also used her social media handles to circulate her commentary. After a recent appearance on MS NOW, for example, she took to LinkedIn to post that the Trump Justice Department was not being completely forthcoming about selective redactions of names in the documents related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein:
“One point I forgot to mention on air, the various privileges DOJ is using to withhold information are entirely waivable by the government, suggesting yet again that #transparency is not the actual goal of the administration as they continuously claim.”
The Department of Investigation is focused on corruption by city employees and vendors, and Shihata has relatively little experience in that realm. She was assigned to the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s public integrity section to handle the prosecution of three federal Bureau of Prisons employees who were ultimately convicted of sexually assaulting female detainees at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
She quit the U.S. attorney’s office in September 2022, shortly after R. Kelly’s conviction, to start a women-run boutique law firm, Shahita and Geddes, along with her co-prosecutor on the case, Elizabeth Geddes.
She appears to have made only four political donations during the 2025 mayoral campaign, all of which went to Mamdani and totaled $700, records show.
Under Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, the DOI played a central role in investigating rampant corruption throughout his administration that ultimately resulted in the indictment of the mayor himself and several top advisors. Several of those investigations are ongoing.
On Thursday, Mamdani promised those probes would continue unabated, stating that former DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber “did an extraordinary job” and promising that DOI was “going to build on” the prior efforts to root out corruption.
In her remarks, Shihata noted she is a naturalized citizen who was born in Egypt. If confirmed, Shihata would be the first woman of color to run DOI.
Describing the law firm she formed in 2022, she said the firm specialized in representing victims of sexual harassment and “people being investigated by the government.”
Responding to a question about whether that could present a conflict of interest at DOI, she said her firm did not represent anyone under investigation by the agency, but added, “If something were to come up with that I’m not aware of at this time, I would follow the appropriate recusal advice.”
The firm has sued the NYPD, seeking records for a paroled inmate who claims he was wrongfully convicted of murdering a woman on the Lower East Side in the late 1990s. Her firm sought records to assist his claim of wrongful conviction and ultimately got the NYPD to turn over much of the homicide file.
Her nomination must be confirmed by the City Council.