Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) is demanding the story get wall-to-wall attention after a new investigation revealed that President Donald Trump’s Justice Department quietly shut down a federal criminal probe into the coal empire of one of his closest Senate allies.
“This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America,” Levin wrote, sharing reporting on the reportedly killed investigation. “The pattern isn’t subtle: protect Trump’s friends, prosecute his critics, and get rewarded with more power. That is corruption, plain and simple. Todd Blanche must not be confirmed.”
The reporting Levin amplified, published by ProPublica in partnership with Mountain State Spotlight, found that Trump administration officials earlier this year terminated a federal criminal investigation into the multistate mining operations owned by Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV) and largely run by his son, Jay. The probe — a joint effort by the EPA, the DOJ’s Environmental Crimes Section, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Virginia — was examining whether the companies’ relentless pollution violations amounted to criminal conduct under the Clean Water Act.
Over the past decade, Justice’s Southern Coal and dozens of affiliated operations have racked up tens of thousands of alleged Clean Water Act violations, according to ProPublica. Prosecutors reportedly believed they had a strong case and initially had the sign-off of Trump’s own top prosecutor in the district to proceed. Then the Office of the Deputy Attorney General — at the time headed by Todd Blanche — shut it down. “They were told ‘pencils down,’” one person familiar with the investigation told ProPublica.
That early intervention struck career officials as extraordinary. The DOJ charges only about a dozen criminal Clean Water Act cases a year, and former federal prosecutor Rick Mountcastle, who spent 24 years in the same Virginia district, said he’d never heard of top officials derailing such a probe at that stage. “There shouldn’t be some sort of untouchables list of people who are immune from enforcement,” he said.
Levin zeroed in on Blanche — Trump’s former personal defense attorney, now acting attorney general and awaiting a Senate confirmation vote to make the role permanent. The congressman alleged Blanche is the “same guy who just gave Trump, his family, and his companies permanent immunity from IRS audits,” and argued his pattern of shielding allies should disqualify him. “Todd Blanche must not be confirmed,” Levin wrote, adding that equal justice under law “was never supposed to come with exceptions for the President’s friends.”
ProPublica framed the shutdown as part of a broader collapse in environmental enforcement under the second Trump administration, including reassigning top environmental lawyers to the immigration crackdown and standing down from diesel-emissions cheating cases.
Justice, a billionaire coal magnate who switched parties at a Trump rally in 2017 and won his Senate seat with Trump’s backing in 2024, helped deliver the GOP its Senate majority.
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