Republicans are crying foul following the news of President Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) targeting West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice’s (R) family.
Justice, who is also a GOP Senate candidate hoping to unseat Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), is the latest to experience political targeting from Biden’s DOJ, as it has filed a civil complaint against his family’s coal empire — over a dozen coal businesses ran or owned by his son Jay Justice — citing “repeated violations of the law” in hopes of recovering what the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division Todd Kim described as “penalties they owe as a result of those violations.”
“Our environmental laws serve to protect communities against adverse effects of industrial activities including surface coal mining operations,” Kim said in a statement. “Through this suit, the Justice Department seeks to deliver accountability for defendants’ repeated violations of the law and to recover the penalties they owe as a result of those violations.”
U.S. Attorney Christopher R. Kavanaugh for the Western District of Virginia claimed defendants have “engaged in over 130 violations of federal law, thereby posing health and safety risks to the public and the environment” over the past five years, concluding the Justice family businesses “failed to remedy those violations and were ordered over 50 times to cease mining activities until their violations were abated.”