The Department of Justice shut down a criminal investigation because the target happened to be Donald Trump's friend.

"They were told 'pencils down.'"

— A person familiar with the investigation into Sen. Jim Justice's coal empire, via ProPublica

A federal criminal investigation into one of the most polluted mining operations in the United States was quietly killed earlier this year. Not because prosecutors found insufficient evidence. Not because charges could not be filed. But because the target was the coal empire owned by Sen. Jim Justice, a Republican from West Virginia and one of President Donald Trump's closest political allies.

The investigation examined potential criminal violations of the Clean Water Act by Southern Coal and dozens of affiliated mining operations run largely by Justice's son, Jay. It was a joint effort between the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice's Environmental Crimes Section, and the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Western District of Virginia. According to current and former officials familiar with the matter, prosecutors believed they had a strong case.

Translation: career federal investigators did their job, built a case, and were told to stop by politicians who owed favors.

Southern Coal and its affiliated companies have racked up tens of thousands of alleged Clean Water Act violations over the past decade. They have been sued repeatedly by state and federal prosecutors for failing to follow environmental laws at their mining sites. The criminal probe represented a significant escalation from civil penalties to actual criminal charges, which is rare. The DOJ only brings a dozen or so criminal Clean Water Act cases each year nationwide.

The investigation had initially received the blessing of Robert Tracci, Trump's top official in the Western District of Virginia. Prosecutors and federal agents began gathering evidence, scrutinizing testimony from the Justice family's various civil trials, and approaching former employees for information. Government attorneys sent subpoenas seeking further documentation, which the company's lawyers opposed.

But before prosecutors could fight over those subpoenas, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General shut down the probe. At the time, Todd Blanche still headed that office, before assuming the role of acting attorney general in April. The message to investigators was unambiguous: pencils down.

Former federal prosecutor Rick Mountcastle, who spent 24 years prosecuting cases in the Western District of Virginia, said he had never heard of top DOJ officials derailing a criminal investigation initiated by career prosecutors at such an early stage. "There shouldn't be some sort of untouchables list of people who are immune from enforcement," he said.

The Justice family's environmental record provides ample reason for skepticism about the shutdown. In a 2023 civil case, Robert Fowler, the companies' former chief of environmental compliance, claimed that Jay Justice blocked him from spending money necessary to comply with environmental laws, including making court-ordered payments and repairing equipment. Emails disclosed in the lawsuit showed complaints of near-daily violations of water permit requirements at times.

Fowler said in his resignation letter and subsequent court filings that the circumstances exposed him to potential civil and criminal liability. The Justice companies denied his accusations, dismissing them as the allegations of a disgruntled former employee. Last month, an Alabama jury found that the Justice companies had made false representations to Fowler, though it did not award him the millions he sought in damages.

A company that lied to its own environmental compliance chief about falsifying records is exactly the kind of defendant criminal prosecutors investigate. It was also exactly the kind of defendant whose investigation got killed.

The shutdown fits a broader pattern at the DOJ under Trump. Just days after his inauguration, the administration reassigned top career environmental lawyers at the Justice Department, including those overseeing the Southern Coal case, to work on Trump's immigration crackdown instead. At the beginning of the year, Blanche personally ordered prosecutors to stand down from cases against diesel emissions cheating.

Environmental enforcement against large polluters has plunged under the second Trump administration across the board. But this case is distinct because it involved a criminal probe into the family company of a sitting senator who helped deliver the Senate majority for Trump in 2023. Justice announced he was switching from Democrat to Republican at a Trump rally in 2017, and Trump backed his Senate bid in a contested GOP primary.

Steven Ruby, an attorney for the Justice companies, told ProPublica that the government's inquiry ultimately found no evidence to pursue criminal charges. "There's never been any intentional wrongdoing by the companies," he said. A DOJ spokeswoman called it a politically motivated prosecution that should have been resolved civilly. She characterized the prosecutors who wanted to pursue charges as deep state actors continuing to push the priorities of the Biden administration.

The Justice family runs a sprawling coal mining enterprise across the South. Forbes tallied Jim Justice's net worth at $1.9 billion until 2021, then declared him broke and facing $1 billion in debt. Environmental groups have accused his companies of misrepresenting their assets to avoid paying environmental penalties. Coal mines routinely leach dangerous chemicals like arsenic into waterways, and the Justice companies' violations are not theoretical. Jay Justice has been a no-show at court hearings involving Clean Water Act violations, and an Alabama judge issued a civil contempt order against him in 2024 for repeated failure to respond to lawsuits.

Justice's Senate office did not respond to questions about the investigation being killed. The EPA and Western District of Virginia referred questions to the DOJ.

The pattern is now unmistakable: if you are Trump's adversary, the DOJ prosecutes aggressively. If you are his ally, career prosecutors are told to put down their pencils. The rule of law is not blind. It looks at your donor list before it looks at your evidence.

The question is not whether this was corrupt. The question is why anyone pretended that a criminal investigation into tens of thousands of environmental violations would survive contact with the Trump Justice Department.