Evidently ruining a river and then trying to cover it up by lying to investigators is OK by the Obama Administration – as long as you didn’t really mean to.
That’s the lesson learned from the announcement that “the Department of Justice (DOJ) has decided not to prosecute an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employee involved in last year’s massive spill of toxic mine waste in Colorado. A year-long investigation by the EPA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that the unnamed employee may have broken federal water pollution law and may have made false statements to law enforcement officials regarding the Gold King Mine spill. But after the OIG referred its findings for potential prosecution, the United States Attorney for Colorado, headed by acting U.S. Attorney Bob Troyer, declined last week to pursue the charges.”
Remember that it was last August that “an EPA contractor doing work toward cleaning up the abandoned mine caused 3 million gallons of sludge containing heavy metals such as arsenic and cadmium into a tributary of the Animas River. The EPA immediately took responsibility for the spill and provided millions of dollars to the area to help it recover. But the agency has still be criticized repeatedly for its actions leading to and following the spill.”
But actual adherence to the law is not required by the Obama administration’s Justice Department. Just ask Hillary Clinton.
GNTownsend says
Any private person would be sitting in jail now…having dumped millions of gallons of toxic sludge into a pristine river ecosystem. However, the US Government gets a free pass when they do it through malfeasance and outright stupidity. I guess they didn’t have any “intent’ to violate environmental laws, so they can’t be found guilty or held accountable for their dumping of massive amounts of waste from a mine into a river. Yeah…no intent to violate environmental laws is the same as no intent to violate national security laws. I wish I was held to the same standard, because the rest of the USA doesn’t have any legal claim to “ignorance of the law” when it comes to getting off major felony charges such as these.