Nicole Schuster, a mechanical engineer for the U.S. Navy, was the project lead for two separate procurements of vertical turning centers, known as SU22 and SU25. In 2017, during the SU22 procurement, Schuster favored one bidder, Company 1, and helped draft specifications that excluded other competitors. Two years later, in 2019, Company 2 submitted a bid for the new SU25 procurement. Upon learning of this, Schuster sent a WhatsApp message to an employee at Company 1, attaching confidential bid documents from Company 2's 2017 SU22 submission. She stated that Company 2 had 'pissed her off' and that she would 'ruin them' if they messed up the contract. The Navy awarded the SU25 contract to Company 1. Schuster was charged with violating the Procurement Integrity Act for disclosing confidential bid information. She entered a guilty plea based on a plea memorandum stating the machines were 'virtually identical' and that the documents contained proprietary data, but the record contained no specific facts proving the 2017 bid information was substantively the same as the 2019 bid information. The District Court accepted the plea and sentenced her to one year and one day in prison.
The Third Circuit applied a plain error standard to review the District Court's acceptance of the guilty plea under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(b)(3). The core legal issue was the interpretation of 41 U.S.C. § 2102(a), which prohibits disclosing bid information 'before the award of a Federal agency procurement contract to which the information relates.' The Government argued that 'relates' meant the information was merely related to a pending procurement, such as being for a similar product. The court rejected this broad reading, noting that the statute uses the active verb clause 'to which the information relates' rather than the passive 'related to.' This phrasing requires a direct, specific connection between the disclosed information and the pending procurement. The court held that for information from a past procurement to violate the statute, it must be 'the same in substance' as the information submitted for the pending procurement. The record showed the machines were similar, but it did not establish that the specific bid data, pricing, or technical specifications from the 2017 bid were the same in substance as those in the 2019 bid. Because the plea agreement lacked facts proving this substantive identity, the District Court plainly erred in accepting the plea.
The conviction and sentence are vacated, and the case is remanded to the District Court for repleading. The decision clarifies that the Procurement Integrity Act does not criminalize the disclosure of old bid data unless that data is substantively identical to data relevant to a current, pending procurement. It places a higher burden on prosecutors to establish a specific factual basis in plea agreements when relying on past procurement data, ensuring that the 'before the award' temporal limitation of the statute is meaningful. The court declined to enter a judgment of acquittal, ruling that the error was trial error rather than a determination of legal insufficiency that would trigger Double Jeopardy protections.