Accessory After The Fact

DOJ Sits On Its Thumbs A Year After Macondo’s Mouth Of Hell Roared

By: bmaz Friday April 22, 2011 5:31 am

Jason Anderson, Aaron Dale Burkeen, Donald Clark, Stephen Curtis, Roy Wyatt Kemp, Karl Kleppinger, Gordon Jones, Blair Manuel, Dewey Revette, Shane Roshto, Adam Weise

These are names you should know. These are the first, and most blatant, victims of the Deepwater Horizon explosion at Macondo. Their actual names do not quickly come to the tongue, nor are they so easy to find. In fact, you know what I had to do to find them? Go through the same process this guy did. And, still, the first link I found them at was his post.

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(N)othing, not diddly squat, has been done. And if the corporate powers that be in this country, and the political puppets who serve them, including Barack Obama, Eric Holder and the currently politicized Department of Justice, have anything to say about it (and they have everything to say about it) nothing significant is going to be done about BP, TransOcean, Halliburton and the Gulf tragedy, or anything related, in the future.

Like the craven and dishonest shell game that has been played by the current administration with regard to torture and destruction of evidence, the US government appears to simply be determined to shine this on with the bare minimum of faux accountability and disingenuous rhetoric to soothe the perturbed masses and maintain status quo with their partners in corporate/political domination of the American populous. That is clearly who they are, and quite apparently who we have become.

So, what could have been the process? Well, that is pretty easily delineated. In fact, I set it out definitively on May 28th of last year. Please refer to the link to the post for a complete list of the factors, nee elements of the crimes, that were already present a year ago. It is startling to realize what was already known then; especially when compounded with what is known now. The only difference today is that we can definitively add the United States government, and the administration of Barack Obama, to the queue of “Criminals in the Gulf“.

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The US government and the Administration/DOJ of Barack Obama is just stringing it out and propping up the status quo and corporate interests such as BP. Seriously, I have been in the criminal law business for two and a half decades, and you literally almost have to fight to not be prosecuting BP for the criminally negligent, if not recklessly indifferent, deaths of the eleven lost souls on Deepwater Horizon.

Like with torture and the financial meltdown, the criminal activity is so obvious you have to consciously want to “look forward” and want to not prosecute in order to not do so. And that is, apparently, just exactly the case with the Obama Administration and the Holder Department of Justice to date. For the better part of a year, DOJ pitched the bogus meme there was a team working diligently on the BP Oil Spill. But that “task force” was led by Tony West and Ignacia Moreno, a couple of talking head tailored suits out of DOJ Main. Knowledgable former EPA criminal investigators pointed out early on, it seemed just for show and, sure enough, very little appears to have resulted from all those months of the DOJ Deepwater Horizon investigation. In fact, the only notable thing which appears to be resulting from the so called “criminal investigation” is that it is being used to shield and hide the real ecological destruction to the Gulf occasioned by the oil spill, such as the inexplicable and tragic dolphin deaths.

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So, what does all this mean for the concept of meaningful and appropriate accountability for BP and the other criminal malefactors in the Gulf Oil Spill? The smart money is on the “nothing good” square. While the DOJ now, all of a sudden, is interested in “streamlining” the case, in actuality it likely is the path being set up for a package deal to resolve everything nice and neat so both BP and the Obama Administration can “look forward”. There are subtle tells as to where the Administration is going. The first tell is the newfound emphasis on “Seamen’s manslaughter”, in that, although it is a felony homicide provision, it only requires a showing of regular negligence, as opposed to gross negligence or recklessness under the traditional criminal homicide provisions.

And this is where the sidelining of the environmental crimes team comes into play. By only dealing in terms of regular negligence, as opposed to gross negligence, on the environmental crimes, the administration can minimize the financial penalties assessed to BP. Under the Clean Water Act, the two factors which determine the size of the financial penalty are the total amount of barrels spilled and whether the spill was the result of ordinary negligence, in which case the strict liability damages are assessed at $1,100 per barrel spilled; or “gross negligence” in which case the fine is as high as $4,300 per barrel spilled.

On the largest oil spill in history, having to pay the severely higher damages under gross negligence would be a serious blow to BP. But BP’s own disclosures reveal they are quite certain that will not occur, and there is every indication the Obama Administration intends to see it does not impose such a “hardship” on its favorite partner for military fuel purposes. Not to mention that Barack Obama is again in full campaign fundraising mode and BP is one of his biggest corporate sponsors.

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BP itself, on the other hand, looks set up to be escorted through the process by the Administration and DOJ mostly unscathed. That is what the government does for its valued corporate partners. In fact, far from being penalized and/or debarred from federal contracting as it should be, as Jason Leopold reported Wednesday, BP is being given sweetheart no-bid contracts by the Administration.

Maybe a rackets prosecutor is the right guy after all, because this is quite a racket being run between the US government and BP. A year after Macondo the Mouth of Hell roared, and it is business as usual. Who could have predicted?