Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice investigators charged a former BP employee with obstruction of justice today, alleging that he tried to destory documents pertaining to the Deepwater Horizon spill and disaster response.
DOJ, in this first criminal case to result from the Deepwater Horizon spill, alleges that former BP engineer Kurt Mix deleted a text message exchange with one of his supervisors from his phone when he discovered they would be turned over to attorneys.”
“The deleted texts, some of which were recovered forensically, included sensitive internal BP information collected in real-time as the Top Kill operations was occurring, which indicated that Top Kill was failing,” according to DOJ. “Top Kill” refers to BP’s attempt to plug the leak by pumping mud into the damaged well.
DOJ further charges that Mix deleted another string of texts with a BP contractor even though “he had received numerous legal hold notices requiring him to preserve such data and had been communicating with a criminal defense lawyer in connection with the pending grand jury investigation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.”
Holder indicated that further charges might emerge against other officials, as “the Deepwater Horizon Task Force is continuing its investigation into the explosion and will hold accountable those who violated the law in connection with the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.”
