A few days ago, I wrote about the $500,000 Abbott gave to the inauguration and the $500,000 in Abbott stock that turned up in the President’s portfolio while his Justice Department sat on a criminal case against the company. I said then that the families whose babies were fed formula from Sturgis were owed a better answer than an invoice.

This morning Bloomberg Law gave us the rest of the story, and it is worse than I thought. The Abbott decision was not a one-off. It has become a policy.

Let me lay out what the Bloomberg reporting adds, because the details matter.

First: the prosecutors wanted the case. According to people familiar with the internal deliberations, the head of DOJ’s Criminal Division, Tysen Duva, actually pushed to charge Abbott — a felony theory that executives conspired to defraud the United States, plus a separate Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act charge against the company itself. Duva, a career line prosecutor, reportedly reviewed the case favorably while he was still awaiting Senate confirmation. When the consumer-protection lawyers were folded into his division last November, supervisors flagged Abbott as ripe — and they liked it precisely because it could hold individuals accountable. They told the team to draft a prosecution memo over Thanksgiving weekend.

Let’s put to rest the idea that this case was dropped because it was weak. The people whose job it is to weigh the evidence looked at it and wanted to indict. That squares with everything the Wall Street Journal already reported: a pile of evidence, and then a dropped case.

Second: the case was killed from the top. The Deputy Attorney General’s office — then run by Todd Blanche — overruled Duva and ordered the criminal probe closed, deciding a civil deal under the False Claims Act was the “more appropriate” resolution. I’ve spent thirty-three years in this world. I know what a civil settlement is and what it is not. It is a check. It is not a prosecution. Nobody goes to prison. No executive lies awake at night. The company writes it off and moves on.

Third — and this is the part every parent need to remember — one of Abbott’s lawyers reportedly warned DOJ that an indictment might cause the company to cancel a roughly $1 billion plant it plans to build in Ohio, along with the hundreds of jobs that come with it.

There it is. Not the Cronobacter on the equipment. Not the whistleblower who said records were falsified. Not the dead babies. A billion-dollar plant and a jobs number.

To its credit, the Department says it gave that argument no weight at all, and that it has reached an agreement in principle with Abbott that includes a significant payment — one it says will send an unmistakable message that companies who endanger babies face serious consequences. I hope that’s true. But forgive me if, after watching a criminal case that supervisors called ripe get spiked in favor of a check, I reserve judgment on how unmistakable the message really is. The families I represent have heard a lot of messages over the years. What deters the next executive is a subpoena, not a settlement.

Fourth, and the reason I’m writing again: this is spreading. Bloomberg reports that after the DAG’s office rejected the Abbott charges, division leaders directed prosecutors to close other food and drug industry probes and imposed a heightened evidentiary standard on corporate investigations going forward. The health and safety unit still has cases open — but they’re reportedly stalling, because the people running them are trying not to get overruled again. Raise the bar high enough and you don’t have to formally decline anything. The cases just quietly die on the vine.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Back in May of 2025 I wrote about the executive order declaring criminal enforcement of regulatory offenses “disfavored,” and about the disbanding of the Consumer Protection Branch — the 215-person office that prosecuted the Peanut Corporation of America executives after the 2009 Salmonella outbreak that killed nine people. I said then that even if this administration had the appetite to prosecute a food company, there would soon be no one left to do the work.

The Bloomberg story is what that prediction looks like in practice. The consumer unit was dissolved, its prosecutors were merged into a division run by managers who’d already decided their work was too aggressive, and the first big case to reach those managers’ bosses got killed. Now the higher bar is the house rule.

There is a bitter little irony in the timing. On June 28, the chief of the health and safety unit, Kate Payerle, stood on a conference panel and told a room full of corporate defense lawyers that her team would keep going after cases like food-plant disease outbreaks. Hours later, the news broke that the Abbott baby-formula probe was dead.

I have spent my entire career arguing that criminal accountability is the one thing that actually changes corporate behavior. Civil cases like mine make companies pay. Criminal cases make executives afraid. You need both. Take the fear away, and you have told every formula maker, every deli, every processor in America that the worst thing that happens when a baby dies is a line item on next quarter’s books.

I said last week that the Sturgis families were owed better than an invoice. I’ll add to it now: so is every family that comes next — because the machinery built to protect them is being dismantled one dropped case at a time.