The U.S. Department of Justice has dropped all obstruction of justice charges against former BP plc engineer Kurt Mix related to the Macondo well blowout in 2005. Mix was part of a team assigned to plug the well and determine how much oil was leaking. He had pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor charge for deleting a single text message conversation with a co-worker, and a jury in December 2013 cleared him of one of two obstruction charges. He won a new trial in 2014 after the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana said he was not tried by an impartial jury (see Daily GPI, June 13, 2014). “I’m thankful that the Department of Justice has finally acknowledged that I did not engage in any act to obstruct justice,” Mix said. His attorney Joan McPhee said the case “is a poster child for what the Department of Justice should not do…We hope the Justice Department will conduct a thorough review of how a meritless case like this gets filed in the first place and then pursued so aggressively for so long.”