Criminal Division

So this was interesting

Two sources familiar with the Justice Department's investigation say the feds have been trying to determine whether BP officials used their knowledge of non-public information about the spill to engage in illegal insider trading.

BP itself has acknowledged for months in public securities filings that the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are "investigating securities matters arising in relation to the incident."

There are no public records indicating that BP executives took advantage of inside information to beat the stock market, where BP shares lost more than half their value in the six weeks after the April 28 disclosure that BP's initial estimate of a 1,000-barrel-a-day spill was wrong. But major BP investors allege in a civil case in Houston that the company low-balled the spill's effects to artificially buttress the stock price.

The interest in possible manipulation of BP's stock price after the April 20 spill may be part of a major change last week in the way that Justice is running its criminal and civil probe of the incident.

James Cole, recently named the No. 2 man in President Obama's Justice Department, has put the department's Criminal Division in charge of the oil spill investigation. That took the lead prosecution role away from the Environment Division, signaling that prosecutors are taking a serious look at possible crimes beyond what caused the spill itself.

BP declined to comment and Justice and the SEC declined to confirm or deny that such an investigation exists.

Maybe the DOJ can take BP into receivership via consent decree the way they're about to do NOPD. After all this kind of dysfunction doesn't just go away on its own.

The U.S. Coast Guard is investigating a large oil sheen about 20 miles north of the site of last April's Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion.

Pollution investigators have been dispatched to Main Pass Block 41 in response to a call around 11 a.m. to the National Response Center, the federal point of contact for reporting oil and chemical spills, said Paul Barnard, an operations controller for Coast Guard Sector New Orleans.

The sheen was described as about a half-mile long and a half-mile wide, he said. Barnard had no further details around 12:30 p.m.