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Opinion | How the Justice Department failed Flint
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The Flint water crisis is still with us. More than a decade later, residents are finally receiving compensation for harms caused by lead-poisoned water. A civil case against the EPA is moving forward in federal court. And national leaders are marking the anniversary of the federal emergency declaration.
Amid all this activity, it’s important to remember what the federal government didn’t do. The U.S. Department of Justice never brought federal charges against anyone involved in the Flint water crisis. Despite thousands of poisoned children and documented deaths, not a single person ever spent a single day in jail.
The DOJ deferred to state prosecutors, a decision that helped shape the quest for justice for Flint – years of investigation, enormous expense, and little, if any, criminal accountability. This outcome is often blamed on Michigan prosecutors. It shouldn’t be.
The Flint water crisis led to one of the most extensive criminal investigations in Michigan history. It involved two attorneys general, cost tens of millions of dollars and resulted in charges against 18 individuals, including former Governor Rick Snyder. It lasted longer than probes involving the Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon oil spills. It lasted longer than the Ken Starr and Bob Mueller probes combined.
And yet the state effort ultimately collapsed.
The federal government never stepped in. No federal indictments were returned. No federal convictions were secured. No federal sentences were imposed. This absence mattered then — and it matters today.
A federal prosecution would not have guaranteed a particular result, but it would have involved a different process. The DOJ exists to handle complex, politically sensitive cases — especially when state and local leaders are implicated. Although the state investigation was extensive, it ultimately could not survive procedural and legal setbacks.
A federal case would have avoided procedural obstacles that undermined the state prosecutions. Michigan law required lengthy preliminary hearings that consumed time and resources. When the Attorney General later turned to a one-person grand jury, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that approach was unlawful. Federal prosecutors operate under different procedures and routinely rely on grand juries.
Federal law gives prosecutors broader options in charging fraud, false statements, and obstruction of justice – statutes that carry significant penalties and are often used in complex investigations. These laws are often broader than their state counterparts and can capture broad forms of financial misconduct. Instead, these federal tools were left unused.
None of this is to suggest bad faith. State prosecutors fought valiantly for justice for Flint. The DOJ often defers to local authorities, and we will never know what, if anything, a federal effort might have produced.
In hindsight, one conclusion is impossible to escape: the state process left meaningful criminal accountability out of reach, and a federal prosecution would have operated under a fundamentally different set of rules.
The lessons here are not limited to Flint. Today’s debates about federal prosecution often focus on the danger of overreach — cases that never should have been opened, subpoenas that never should have been issued, charges that never should have been brought. These abuses are real because they deploy the government’s immense power where neither the law nor the facts justify it.
But Flint illustrates the opposite danger. Prosecutorial inaction can also be unjust. History shows that when local systems do not act — whether in civil rights cases decades ago or in more recent crises — federal intervention has often been decisive.
In Flint, the DOJ was the cavalry that never came. We cannot change that history, but we can learn from it. When the law supports it and the facts demand it, federal prosecution can serve an essential role — not just for Flint, but for all of us.
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