Thursday, April 26, 2012
Kurt Mix (AP/Pat Sullivan)
In what some legal analysts characterized as a small catch aimed at snaring a larger fish, the Obama administration filed criminal charges this week against a BP engineer who was involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill cleanup.
Kurt Mix, who has since left the company, was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice for deleting text messages that discussed the amount of oil leaking from the broken undersea well.
Given Mix’s low rank at BP, the U.S. Department of Justice may be planning to pressure the engineer into cooperating with authorities who want to go after executives at the petroleum giant.
“The government is trying to use what they have against some people as leverage to implicate higher-ranking people,” Richard J. Lazarus, a Harvard law school professor who was executive director of the federal panel that investigated the BP spill, told The New York Times.
Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said his department is still probing the accident and the events that followed, adding that the administration “will hold accountable those who violated the law in connection with the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
To Learn More:
Engineer Arrested in BP Oil Spill Case (by Clifford Krauss, New York Times)
Arrest of BP Engineer Exposes the Smoking Gun? (by Robert Cavnar, Huffington Post)
Greg Palast for BuzzFlash at Truthout, Arrest of BP Scapegoat: Real Killers Walk (by Greg Palast, BuzzFlash)
Affidavit (U.S. Department of Justice) (pdf)
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