The Wall Street Journal reported on June 28 — in a story headlined “The Baby Formula Probe Produced a Pile of Evidence. Then the DOJ Dropped the Case.” — that the Justice Department has quietly closed its years-long criminal investigation into Abbott Laboratories over the contamination at its Sturgis, Michigan infant-formula plant. Reuters picked it up the same day.
According to the Journal, some of the prosecutors on the case believed they had the evidence to bring criminal charges — under the very same federal food-safety law the government has used to go after other companies that sold contaminated food. Some supervisors reportedly thought it was a good case. The people at the top closed it, anyway, opting instead to claw back some of the money Abbott made selling formula through federally funded nutrition programs.
A DOJ spokeswoman explained the philosophy this way: the department, she said, does not believe in “regulation by prosecution.”
Let me translate that from Washington into English. It means that if you make infant formula in a plant where deadly Cronobacter is found, where a whistleblower says records were falsified and untested product was released, and where your own environmental testing had flagged the pathogen years earlier — the current Justice Department would prefer to send you an invoice than a subpoena.
This is not a close call on the facts, and it never was.
In late 2021 and early 2022, infants who were fed powdered formula from Abbott’s Sturgis plant got sick. Regulators found Cronobacter sakazakii on equipment inside the facility. At least two babies died and others were hospitalized; the FDA received reports of additional infant deaths tied to the plant. Abbott recalled Similac, Alimentum and EleCare and shut Sturgis down — a plant that at one point supplied roughly a fifth of the infant formula in this country — and the closure touched off a national formula shortage that had parents driving across state lines and calling strangers to find a can of formula for a hungry baby.
Abbott points out, correctly, that the Cronobacter strains found in the plant did not genetically match the isolates from the sick infants. That is the defense, and the company is entitled to make it. But the FDA and CDC have been equally clear that the absence of a genetic match does not exonerate the plant — and the rest of the record is damning. FDA inspectors described conditions there in terms like “egregiously unsanitary.” A 2021 whistleblower complaint accused management of falsifying records and misleading inspectors. Reporting by ProPublica found that Abbott’s own testing had turned up Cronobacter at the facility back in 2019 and 2020. This was, in other words, exactly the kind of case the criminal food-safety statutes were written for.
Here is why the families I represent — and every parent who lived through the 2022 shortage — should be furious.
Abbott gave $500,000 to President Trump’s inaugural fund. Public Citizen has documented that Abbott was one of 58 corporations facing federal investigations or enforcement that together poured some $50 million into the inauguration. Public Citizen’s Rick Claypool has argued that gifts like these can function as down payments for pardons or for decisions to drop enforcement actions — and to be fair, he framed that as a concern, not as a proven exchange. Abbott has declined to comment on its political giving.
And then there is the stock. As Common Dreams reported this week, the President’s own annual financial disclosure — 927 pages listing thousands of trades worth more than a billion dollars — shows that Trump began buying Abbott stock in late September of last year and picked up roughly $500,000 worth of Abbott shares over the course of 2025. The buying happened while his Justice Department was still sitting on a criminal case against the company.
$500,000 into the inauguration. $500,000 in stock in the President’s own portfolio.
No court and no investigator has found that the donation or the stock purchases caused this case to be dropped. What is undisputed is the sequence: the money, and then the vanished prosecution. Whether one caused the other is a question no one in a position to answer has been willing to answer.
But here is the thing about food-safety enforcement — it runs entirely on public trust. The whole point of holding a company criminally accountable is deterrence: the next executive weighing whether to ship product from a plant with a pathogen problem needs to believe 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 the 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.
The Justice Department says it doesn’t believe in regulation by prosecution. Fine. But there is a difference between declining to over-prosecute and declining to prosecute a company that donated $500,000 to the President who now also owns $500,000 of its stock.
The families whose babies were fed formula from Sturgis are owed a better answer than an invoice — and a lot better than silence.