Trump Loaded Up on Abbott Laboratories Stock Before His DOJ Dropped Criminal Probe

US President Donald Trump last year purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars of Abbott Laboratories stock before his Justice Department dropped a years-long criminal investigation into the company, which was accused of misconduct after infant hospitalizations and deaths were linked to one of its baby formula factories.

The stock purchases were revealed in the president's annual financial disclosure report, which spans 927 pages and shows thousands of trades valued at over $1 billion. Trump's first purchase of Abbott stock last year was made in late September, and the president bought around $500,000 worth of shares in total in 2025, according to the nonprofit media organization More Perfect Union.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that "top decision makers" at the Department of Justice shut down the criminal investigation into Abbott—which donated $500,000 to Trump's inaugural fund—even though "some prosecutors believed they had evidence to criminally charge the company under a law they have used to pursue other businesses for allegedly selling contaminated foods."

"Prosecutors had been considering a misdemeanor charge against Abbott for violating the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and a separate count for misleading the government," the Journal reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. "Investigators in early 2022 had found traces of a potentially deadly bacteria at its plant in Sturgis, Michigan, including on equipment very close to infant formula containers—as well as a long list of other problems."

The Food and Drug Administration received reports of at least nine infant deaths linked to baby formula produced at Abbott's Sturgis plant, which the company temporarily shut down amid fears of dangerous contamination. The Justice Department launched its investigation into Abbott, the largest infant formula manufacturer in the US, in 2023, under the administration of former President Joe Biden.

Trump's DOJ has taken a far more lax approach to corporate enforcement, reaching sweetheart settlement deals with companies accused of price-fixing, stifling competition, and other illegal activities.

The Journal reported that the Justice Department and Abbott "reached a settlement to resolve" a separate but related civil lawsuit alleging that the company knowingly "failed to follow manufacturing standards to protect against the risk of contamination."

"That suit, which was joined by 31 states, alleged that Abbott had a 'culture of concealment' at Sturgis and 'withheld information from FDA related to the presence of microorganisms in the Sturgis facility,'" the Journal observed.

Last April, the investigative outlet ProPublica reported that workers at Abbott's Sturgis plant—which resumed production in June 2022—said the company was still "engaging in unsanitary practices similar to those that led it to temporarily shut down."

"Current and former employees told ProPublica that they have seen the plant in Sturgis, Michigan take shortcuts when cleaning manufacturing equipment and testing for microbes," the outlet reported. "The employees said leaks in the factory are sometimes not fixed, a dangerous problem that can promote bacterial growth. They also said workers at the facility do not always take required swabs to check for pathogens while performing maintenance during production. Supervisors have urged workers to increase production and have retaliated against workers who complained about problems, the employees said.

Abbott, whose stock is down significantly year-to-date but up over the past month, called the ProPublica story "misleading" and impugned the motives of workers who spoke to the outlet.

Trump's purchase of Abbott stock wasn't the only buy that preceded significant action by his administration.

"On April 8, 2025, the day before Trump announced the tariff pause, the disclosure shows 327 individual stock purchases worth as much as $12.8 million, one of the largest single-day stock buying sprees disclosed in the filing," Sludge reported on Wednesday. "The purchases included Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet, each valued as much as $250,000, along with scores of other companies. The S&P 500 jumped nearly 10% the following day when Trump announced the pause, one of the largest single-day gains in the index's history."