Federal prosecutors wanted felony charges. The assistant attorney general of the DOJ's own Criminal Division backed them up. And then senior leadership at the Justice Department looked at all of that, looked at a baby formula contamination case linked to infant deaths, and said: no thanks, we'll take a settlement. Sen. Adam Schiff wants to know why, and honestly, so should everyone else.
What Actually Happened at the Abbott Plant
In 2022, Abbott Laboratories recalled several of its powdered formula brands, including Similac, after infants became ill following exposure to products made at Abbott Nutrition's facility in Sturgis, Michigan. The FDA reported that five infants were hospitalized due to Cronobacter bacterial infections, and said those infections may have contributed to the deaths of two of them.
Cronobacter sakazakii is not a bacteria you want anywhere near infant formula. It can cause fatal meningitis in newborns, and it disproportionately destroys the most vulnerable babies, premature infants and those with compromised immune systems. The kind of infants who have no choice but to be in a NICU, hooked to monitors, entirely dependent on the adults around them to not poison their food supply.
Abbott has disputed the contamination findings aggressively. The company told CBS News that no unopened distributed formula ever tested positive for Cronobacter, and that the FDA confirmed as much at the time of the recall. Abbott also noted that in one case, Cronobacter was later found on breast pump parts in the infant's home. The company's position is essentially: not us. The DOJ's own court filings, however, tell a different story about what was happening inside that plant.
Prosecutors Said Charge Them. DOJ Said Close the File.
Here is where this gets genuinely infuriating. According to sources with knowledge of the matter, cited by CBS News, federal prosecutors were pushing for felony charges against Abbott Laboratories and several of its executives. They had the support of Tysen Duva, the assistant attorney general overseeing the DOJ's Criminal Division. That is not a junior staffer sending a strongly worded email. That is the person whose job it is to decide whether the government should pursue serious criminal cases.
Senior DOJ leadership overruled them and shut the investigation down. The Wall Street Journal first reported the closure. Bloomberg Government had previously reported on Duva's efforts to keep the case alive and on the broader alarm it set off about the DOJ retreating from corporate prosecutions involving public health.
A senior DOJ official told CBS News that a civil False Claims Act resolution was "the best mechanism to achieve accountability, deterrence and protection of the public." A significant monetary penalty is reportedly part of the deal. The official also said, with a straight face presumably, that Abbott's potential plans to build a new $1 billion facility in Ohio played absolutely no role in the decision to kill the criminal case. Fine. Sure.
The False Claims Act Case Tells You Everything the DOJ Doesn't Want to Say Out Loud
While the criminal case was getting quietly buried, the civil False Claims Act case was still grinding forward in court. And the things DOJ lawyers were writing in that case, about Abbott, are extraordinary.
In a February 2026 court filing, after Abbott asked a federal judge to toss the lawsuit, DOJ lawyers wrote that "Abbott repeatedly lied to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and State agencies when it represented that it produced powder infant formula under conditions that complied with FDA rules." They went on to say that "none of the misplaced arguments in Abbott's motion can turn a years-long and widespread failure to manufacture compliant powder infant formula into a regulatory disagreement or record-keeping error."
Years-long. Widespread failure. Repeated lying to federal regulators. That is the DOJ's own language, in a public court document. And the same DOJ decided that none of that rose to the level of criminal prosecution. Schiff pointed directly to those filings in his July 8 letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, which CBS News reviewed, and asked the obvious question: if you believed all of that, why is a settlement the end of this story?
The Kirkland & Ellis Detail That Schiff Wants Blanche to Explain
Schiff's letter did not stop at the prosecutorial decisions. It raised another question that is either a remarkable coincidence or something considerably worse. Abbott Laboratories is represented by the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Kirkland & Ellis is one of the major law firms that struck a deal with the Trump administration last year to provide pro-bono legal services to pro-Trump causes, as part of the wave of big firm capitulations that happened earlier in 2025.
Schiff flagged this directly and asked Blanche to address it. The implication is obvious enough that it does not require spelling out. An attorney at Kirkland & Ellis representing Abbott did not respond to CBS News's request for comment, which is probably the legally sensible move.
Blanche is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 15, where Schiff, who sits on that committee, will have the opportunity to ask all of this in person. In public. On the record. That should be a fun morning.
What the Law Actually Allows Here
The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act prohibits the manufacture and distribution of adulterated food, and it gives prosecutors a range of tools to pursue violations. Under the law's strict liability standard, prosecutors can bring misdemeanor charges without proving anyone knew they were breaking the law. Historically, CBS News notes, the DOJ has focused on felony violations, which require proving intent.
The prosecutors in this case were not pushing misdemeanors. They wanted felonies. They believed they could prove intent. The assistant attorney general of the Criminal Division agreed. The people at the top of the DOJ did not, and they will collect whatever civil penalty they negotiate with Abbott and call it accountability.
For a corporation the size of Abbott Laboratories, a monetary settlement, however significant, is a line item. It is a cost. It gets priced in, absorbed, and forgotten. Criminal charges against executives are not forgettable. They are the thing that actually changes behavior. The DOJ knows this. Everyone in the building knows this. The choice to go civil here was a choice.
The Dingo Take
Let's be clear about what the DOJ is asking us to accept. Prosecutors wanted to charge a baby formula company with felonies after infants died and two years of documented regulatory lying. The head of the Criminal Division backed those prosecutors. And the people running the Justice Department under Todd Blanche looked at all of it and decided the right move was a quiet civil settlement with a company represented by a law firm that just finished doing favors for the Trump administration. We are asked to believe this is a coincidence and that Ohio factory announcements had nothing to do with anything. Okay.
The thing that makes this story genuinely dark, beyond the politics, is who got hurt. Not shareholders. Not regulators. Infants in neonatal units whose parents had no other options. Premature babies. The people with the least power imaginable, fed formula from a plant that the DOJ's own lawyers described as engaged in a years-long, widespread failure. And the response to that, from the Justice Department of the United States of America, is a settlement with terms that haven't even been made public yet.
Schiff's July 15 hearing is worth watching. Blanche will almost certainly say as little as possible under oath, because there is no version of this that sounds good when you say it out loud. But Schiff has the receipts, the DOJ's own court filings, the prosecutors' recommendations, the Kirkland & Ellis connection. The question is whether any of it matters in a political moment where the people in charge have concluded that accountability is optional and corporate goodwill is not.
