Justice Department lawyers have called into question a key pillar of the FBI’s case against the late Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist accused of mailing anthrax letters that killed five people a decade ago, the McClatchy Newspapers, Propublica and Frontline reported.
Despite the circumstantial nature of the case against Ivins, federal investigators believed they had their man. His job at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Derick, Md., gave him the means and opportunity to make the specific strain of pure, powdered anthrax linked to the letters, investigators maintained.
But Ivins committed suicide shortly before investigators labeled him the mass murderer in 2008, and many still questioned whether he really was the one who sent letters to congressional buildings and post offices in 2001.
The department closed its investigation into the case last year. But now, DOJ lawyers say in court papers that the sealed area of Ivin’s lab that investigators say he used to make the spores did not have the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder used in the attacks.
The new court filings come from West Palm Beach, Fla., where the DOJ’s Civil Division is defending a wrongful-death case brought by Maureen Stevens, the widow of photo editor Robert Stevens, who was the first person killed by a letter while working at The Sun tabloid. The case faults careless procedures at the government lab for allowing the killer to make the anthrax that caused Stevens’ death.
But DOJ lawyers have sought to counter Maureen Stevens’ claims by arguing that the anthrax was not made in Ivin’s lab.
The papers were filed July 15 and uncovered by a reporter from PBS’s “Frontline” program.
And in a deposition made public in the case last week, USAMRIID’s Bacteriology Division Chief Patricia Worsham also said the machine used to dry the spores wasn’t kept in the lab.
“If someone had used that to dry down that preparation, I would have expected that area to be very, very contaminated, and we had nonimmunized personnel in that area, and I would have expected some of them to become ill,” she said.
Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, told McClatchy that the court filing didn’t contradict the government’s conclusion that Ivins sent the letters. Instead, he said the lawyers merely argued that “Ivins’ actions were not foreseeable to his supervisors at USAMRIID,” because he didn’t have equipment necessary to dry the spores in his containment lab.
But Paul Kemp, Ivins’ lead defense attorney, said that the department’s concession “invalidat[es] one of the chief theories of their prosecution case,” according to McClatchy.
UPDATE: In a statement Tuesday, DOJ spokesman Dean Boyd said the motion filed by the department and cited in the McClatchy report “contained inaccurate information.” The department amended its filing to make clear that it still stood behind its findings that Ivins mailed the anthrax letters and that “Dr. Ivins had the necessary equipment in the containment suite where RMR-1029 was housed to perpetrate those attacks and that a lyophilizer [a machine for dehydrating substances] which he ordered, and which was labeled ‘property of Bruce Ivins,’ was stationed in a nearby containment suite.”
