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us department of justice
Trump Loaded Up on Abbott Laboratories Stock Before His DOJ Dropped Criminal Probe
Abbott, which donated $500,000 to the president's inaugural fund, faced an investigation stemming from alleged deadly contamination at one of its baby formula plants in Michigan.
Jul 02, 2026
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.
SHOCKING: Trump's latest financial disclosures reveal that he invested upwards of $500,000 in Abbott two months before his DOJ dropped the case. https://t.co/qHXF6wvUct
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) July 1, 2026
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."
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'Criminalizing Dissent': Alarm Grows Over Extreme Prison Terms for Texas ICE Protesters
“Now anyone engaged in basic protests with the wrong political beliefs can be labeled a domestic terrorist, when they have no intention of violence," said one attorney.
Jun 26, 2026
Alarm and outrage mounted this week following a federal judge's lengthy prison sentences for a group of activists falsely accused by the Trump administration of being members of a nonexistent "North Texas Antifa Cell," with some observers calling the extreme punishments—including 30 years for moving a box of constitutionally protected pamphlets—a test case for criminalizing dissent.
Eight members of the "Prairieview Nine"—part of a larger group of activists who staged a July 4, 2025 protest outside a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Alvarado, Texas—were sentenced Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Fort Worth to between 30-100 years imprisonment.
Benjamin Song, who was convicted of shooting Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross, was sentenced to 100 years for attempted murder of a law enforcement officer and lesser offenses, including discharging a firearm during a violent crime, conspiracy to use and using an explosive, and rioting. Song, a former US Marine, contends that he shot Gross in self-defense after the officer drew his gun first.
The “explosives” in question were fireworks brought to the July 4 protest to show solidarity with people detained by ICE.
Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Bradford Morris, and Elizabeth Soto got 50 years each for rioting, providing material support to terrorists, and conspiracy to use and using an explosive.
Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years for rioting, providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to use and using an explosive, and conspiracy to conceal documents. Those documents were leftist pamphlets protected by the First Amendment.
Rueda's husband, Daniel “Des” Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was hit with a 30-year prison sentence for conspiracy to conceal documents for moving a box full of the pamphlets after speaking with his wife. He did not attend the protest.
Judge Reed O’Connor, an appointee of former President George W. Bush and a favorite of right-wing judge shoppers, told the court that the lengthy sentences are meant to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology” with the defendants, according to one observer of Tuesday’s proceedings.
The Prairieland sentences were more severe than the longest prison term for the average US murderer or rapist, as well as for the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrectionists—all of whom were later pardoned by President Donald Trump—as well as for convicted child sex trafficker and Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
"What happened on Tuesday, it’s shocking to all of us, devastating to the families, 50- to 100-year sentences," Sufia Khalid, deputy director of the National Security Criminal Defense Center at the Muslim Legal Fund of America and lawyer to one of the Prairieland defendants, told Democracy Now! on Thursday. "Those are essentially life sentences for all of the young people in this case, largely of whom were engaged in nonviolent protest at an ICE detention facility."
A group of anti-ICE protesters in Texas were sentenced to 30 to 100 years in jail on Tuesday, after federal prosecutors accused them of being an "antifa terror cell."
The activists attended a protest and noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE jail in Alvarado, Texas.… pic.twitter.com/QxFMPaGsvj
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) June 25, 2026
Khalid noted that the Department of Justice (DOJ) invoked a rarely used "material support for terrorism" statute that "does not require any connection to a domestic terrorist organization or any kind."
"Any American can be targeted that way now. It does not require ties to antifa or to any domestic terrorist organization," she said. "That’s a dangerous precedent, and what allowed them to stack these charges so high on Tuesday."
The DOJ hailed “the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with antifa following... Trump’s executive order designating the group as a domestic terrorist organization in September 2025" in the wake of the assassination of white supremacist influencer Charlie Kirk—which had nothing to do with antifa, a decentralized and leaderless international ideology opposing fascism that's more of a mindset than a movement.
Later that month, Trump also signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), a directive titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” that focuses exclusively on left-wing activities and mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
Khalid pointed to the pardoned January 6 insurrectionists, who "were involved in rioting, carrying massive arsenals of weapons, lots of discussions ahead of time—that didn’t exist in this case—about targeting law enforcement, wanting to kill members of Congress, [and] actually storming the Capitol."
"So, we have a massive, unwarranted sentencing disparity here," she said. "What happened in the court in Fort Worth was unconstitutional and should concern everybody in this country in the direction that it is taking us."
Mark Osler, a law professor and sentencing expert at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, told The Guardian on Friday that "the 30-year sentence for Estrada is probably the one that for most people will come closest to shocking the conscience, simply because this is an activity that took place after the harm occurred."
"What happened in the court in Fort Worth was unconstitutional and should concern everybody in this country in the direction that it is taking us."
Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, underscored during a Friday interview in an episode of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's Counterspin podcast titled "Criminalizing Dissent" that Estrada "wasn't even at the protest."
"He's somebody who allegedly transported a box of pamphlets because his wife was at the protest," Stern said. "And he believed, according to prosecutors, that the box of pamphlets might implicate his wife... so he was concealing evidence."
"Evidence of what?" he continued. "This wasn't a how-to manual... They were zines. They said nothing about this protest, about the Prairieland detention facility, about shooting this police officer... So when they say that he concealed evidence by moving these zines, evidence of what? It's evidence of an ideology. It's evidence of somebody's reading habits."
"And now they're on the same plane as terrorists, as [Islamic State], according to this administration," Stern added. "It's all pretty absurd. But at the end of the day, we have a Constitution that prohibits people from being locked up for what they think, write, or read, as long as they are not inciting imminent violence. So hopefully the appellate courts will reverse these convictions. But the law is only as good as the people who enforce it."
Jeremy Busby, an incarcerated journalist, wrote on the eve of Estrada's trial that the "homespun zines at issue contain no plans for any shooting, and under normal circumstances, they would clearly be deemed constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment."
"But the government’s concealment theory only makes sense if it views merely having the literature as criminal," he argued. “Criminalizing possession of literature is a miscarriage of justice, whether in prison or at a protester’s husband’s parents’ house. If the Trump administration is allowed to send Estrada to prison for the crime of possessing literature, members of society at large can be subjected to the same pernicious rules as the incarcerated.”
Amber Lowrey, the sister of Prairieland defendant Savanna Batten—who was sentenced to 50 years behind bars for material support for terrorism and conspiracy to use and using "explosives" (fireworks)—told The Guardian before Batten's trial that the Trump administration just wants "to make an example of people and silence anyone who... opposes the government."
"They want to silence dissent, criminalize dissent," she added.
Trump administration prosecutors have also invoked NSPM-7 in the case of 15 organizers with the groups Direct Action Minnesota and Black Cat Workers, who are accused of impeding the Department of Homeland Security’s anti-immigrant crackdown in Minneapolis, where US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti were separately killed earlier this year by ICE and Border Patrol officers.
"We live under a fascist state where ICE agents can murder us with impunity, yet we can go to prison for 50 years for protesting," socialist commentator and journalist Ryan Knight said Thursday on X. "The unjust sentences of the Prairieland protesters violate the First Amendment and infringe on our rights to fight back against a tyrannical government."
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Ordering Release of More Epstein Files, Judge Says Trump DOJ 'Conceded' It Violated Transparency Law
"We're one step closer to the full release of the Epstein files and getting survivors the justice they've long deserved," said US Rep. Ro Khanna.
Jun 26, 2026
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the US Department of Justice to release more FBI files related to the investigation of late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, while finding that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche violated the law that mandated their release.
In his ruling, US District Judge Emmet Sullivan said that Blanche "conceded that he is in violation" of the 2025 Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the DOJ to release all unclassified files related to the Epstein case, as well as a log detailing justifications for redactions made to the files, by December 19, 2025.
Sullivan noted that Blanche failed to respond substantively to claims made by plaintiff Katie Phang, an attorney and former host on MSNOW who in a lawsuit accused the DOJ of improperly "redacting the names of co-defendants in a draft indictment, the names of individuals identified as 'co-conspirators.'"
Phang also alleged that Blanche improperly withheld information in the files that incriminated President Donald Trump, including "notes from FBI interviews with a victim who has alleged that in the 1980s, when she was about 13 years old, Epstein introduced her to Trump, who in turn assaulted her."
Sullivan granted Phang's request for a preliminary injunction and gave the DOJ until July 2 to release the information sought in the complaint or provide a more detailed explanation justifying its redaction.
In an analysis of the ruling, former US Attorney Joyce Vance argued that Sullivan was correct on the merits given that the information requested by Phang is "material that the [Epstein Files Transparency Act] clearly called for production of and that the government simply refused to provide, without offering reasons that justified withholding it."
Vance also remarked that "given the items the government must now provide publicly" as a result of Sullivan's ruling, "this is a highly significant development and a real win not just for Katie, but for the victims and the survivors."
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who along with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) authored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, celebrated Sullivan's verdict while crediting Phang for forcing the government's hand.
"Thanks to [Phang's] tireless work, we're one step closer to the full release of the Epstein files," wrote Khanna, "and getting survivors the justice they've long deserved."
Brendan Ballou, an attorney representing Phang in the case, told Politico on Thursday that the administration's attempted coverup of the files was slowly coming apart.
"The government ignored its own law and blew off a judge’s order, all for the sake of protecting the very powerful and the very rich,” Ballou said. “Doing so had consequences, and now the public will finally get transparency around Jeffrey Epstein and his network.”
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