For two weeks I have been writing that the Justice Department quietly walked away from a criminal case against Abbott Laboratories over the Cronobacter contamination at its Sturgis, Michigan infant-formula plant — the plant where babies got sick, where at least two died, and where prosecutors reportedly believed they had the evidence to charge. Now a United States Senator is asking the same thing, in writing, and the acting Attorney General is going to have to answer for it under oath.

Credit where it is due: Sarah N. Lynch, the senior Justice Department reporter at CBS News, got this one first. She reported that Sen. Adam Schiff has launched a congressional inquiry into why DOJ shuttered the Abbott investigation, built around a July 8 letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that CBS reviewed. Schiff’s question is the one every parent who lived through the 2022 formula shortage should be asking: how is it that a case involving deadly risk to medically fragile infants, teed up with a recommendation to charge, was not worth prosecuting? If premature babies are not a priority, he wrote, what exactly is?

Lynch’s reporting fills in the part that ought to make your stomach turn. Line prosecutors wanted felony charges. They had the backing of Tysen Duva, the assistant attorney general running the Criminal Division. And senior leadership at the top of the building ordered the case closed anyway, opting for a civil settlement under the False Claims Act whose terms — of course — have not been made public. A senior DOJ official told CBS the civil route was “the best mechanism to achieve accountability, deterrence and protection of the public,” and volunteered that Abbott’s plans for a possible $1 billion plant in Ohio “played no role” in the decision. When a spokesman offers up a denial to a question you did not ask, take note of the question.

Schiff also flagged something I had not seen spelled out before: Abbott is represented by Kirkland & Ellis — one of the firms that cut a deal with this administration to hand over free legal work for favored causes. He asked Blanche, pointedly, whether a DOJ that actually enforced the law “regardless of the political affiliation of its Attorney General” would have accepted a settlement that reads like a cost of doing business rather than a criminal charge. He’ll get his chance to press it in person on July 15, when Blanche sits before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing.

And notice who is standing where. The lawyer now running the FDA, Acting Commissioner Kyle Diamantas, came to government straight from defending Abbott — at Jones Day, against claims that its specialized preemie formula was tied to a deadly bowel disease. I wrote him a letter about it, one formula lawyer to another. So follow the chain: a former Abbott defense lawyer now regulates the company, an administration-favored firm shields it from the criminal case, and the criminal case is gone. Call that coincidence if you can keep a straight face.

When the Journal first reported the closure, a DOJ spokeswoman explained the philosophy as a refusal to engage in “regulation by prosecution.” I translated that from Washington into English at the time: if you make infant formula in a plant where deadly Cronobacter turns up on the equipment, where a whistleblower says records were falsified and untested product shipped, and where your own environmental testing flagged the bug years earlier, the current Justice Department would rather send you an invoice than a subpoena. Yes, Abbott is entitled to its defense — no unopened, distributed formula tested positive, and the plant strains did not genetically match the infant isolates. The company has made that argument, and it is a fair one to make. But FDA still calls what was found at Sturgis a serious concern, the government’s own civil case accuses Abbott of knowingly falling short and concealing it, and “knowingly” and “concealment” are not the words of a clerical error. They are the words you build a criminal case around.

There is also the arithmetic I laid out last week. Abbott gave $500,000 to the President’s inaugural fund. The President’s own financial disclosure shows he bought roughly $500,000 in Abbott stock over 2025 — while his Justice Department still sat on the criminal file. No investigator has found that the money caused the case to vanish. What is undisputed is the sequence: the money, and then the vanished prosecution. Schiff is now asking someone in a position to answer to actually answer.

I have litigated foodborne-illness cases since 1993, and food-safety enforcement runs on exactly one thing: the belief, in the mind of the next executive weighing whether to ship product from a plant with a pathogen problem, that the government will come after him personally if a baby dies. Take that fear away — replace it with a negotiated check written out of money the company already made — and you have told every formula maker in America that the downside of poisoning an infant is a line item. Worse, the very office that brings these cases, the Consumer Protection Branch, was being disbanded as a cost-cutting move even as this decision came down.

This is not a one-off. I am still asking where the Boar’s Head criminal investigation went after ten people died. I represent families of babies hospitalized with botulism in the ByHeart and Nara outbreaks right now. These are the cases that land downstream when accountability upstream gets dressed up as bad luck and quietly settled.

Thank you, Senator Schiff. And thank you, Sarah Lynch, for the reporting. The families whose babies were fed formula from Sturgis are owed a better answer than an invoice — and a lot better than silence. On July 15, one of them gets to be asked out loud.

First, for a bit(e) of background history.

In 1938 Congress passed the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) in reaction to growing public food safety demands.  The primary goal of the Act was to protect the health and safety of the public by preventing deleterious, adulterated or misbranded articles, including food, from entering interstate commerce.

Under section 402(a)(4) of the Act, a food product is deemed “adulterated” if the food was “prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby it may have become contaminated with filth, or whereby it may have been rendered injurious to health.” A food product is also considered “adulterated” if it bears or contains any poisonous or deleterious substance, which may render it injurious to health. Chapter III of the Act addresses prohibited acts, subjecting violators to both civil and criminal liability.

Felony violations include adulterating or misbranding a food, drug, or device, and putting an adulterated or misbranded food, drug, or device into interstate commerce.  Any person who commits a prohibited act violates the FDCA.  A person committing a prohibited act “with the intent to defraud or mislead” is guilty of a felony punishable by years in jail and millions in fines or both. The key here is an intentional act.

A misdemeanor conviction under the FDCA, unlike a felony conviction, does not require proof of fraudulent intent, or even of knowing or willful conduct.  Rather, a person may be convicted if he or she held a position of responsibility or authority in a firm such that the person could have prevented the violation.  Convictions under the misdemeanor provisions are punishable by not more than one year or fined not more than $250,000, or both.