From Demon in the Freezer (pages 214-216):
He went back to work. A minute later the, he glanced over at the tube. The anthrax was gone again. He tapped the cap, and the anthrax fell to the bottom. He stared at the bone colored particles. Now he saw them climbing the walls of the tube, dancing along the plastic, heading upward.
His assistant, Denise Braun, was working nearby, “Denise, you’ll never believe this.”
The anthrax was like jumping beans; it seemed to have a life of its own.
He began preparing a sample for the scope. He opened the tube and tapped a little bit of the anthrax onto a piece of sticky black tape that would hold the powder in place. But the anthrax bounced off the tape. The particles wouldn’t stick. Eighty percent of the Daschle particles flittered away in air currents up into the hood. That was when he under- stood that the Hart Building was utterly contaminated.
He somehow managed to get some of the particles to stick to the tape. He hurried the sample into the scope room, put it under a scanning scope, and zoomed in.
What he saw shocked him.
The spores were stuck together into chunks that looked like moon rocks. They reminded him of grinning jack-o’-lanterns, skeletons, hip sockets, and Halloween goblin faces. The anthrax particles had an eroded, pitted look, like meteorites fallen to earth. Most chunks were very tiny, sometimes just one or two spores, but there were also boulders. One boulder looked to him like a human skull, with eye sockets and a jaw hanging open and screaming. It was an anthrax skull.
The skulls were falling apart. He could see them crumbling into tiny clumps and individual spores, smaller and smaller as he watched. This was anthrax designed to fall apart in the air, to self-crumble, maybe when it encountered humidity or other conditions. He had a national-security clearance, and he knew something about anthrax, but he could not imagine how this weapon had been made. It looked extremely sinister. He started feeling shaky.
He called Jahrling. “Pete, I’m in the scope room. Can you come up here, like right now?”
Jahrling ran upstairs, closed the door, and stared at the skull anthrax for a long time. He didn’t say much. Geisbert’s security clearance was rated secret, and the details of how this material could have been made might be more highly classified.
Not long afterward, Jahrling apparently went to the Secure Room and had the classified safe opened. He studied a document or documents with red-slashed borders that would appear to contain exact technical formulas for various kinds of weapons-grade anthrax. In the papers, there almost certainly secrets for making skull anthrax of the type he had just seen in the scope.
Jahrling refers to the secret of skull anthrax as the Anthrax Trick, although he won’t discuss it. Could this stuff have been made in Iraq? Could this be an American trick? Who knew the Anthrax Trick?
So, what's your point? The average 8-year-old has seen how static electricity will affect dust particles, causing them to jump around. The fact that Geisbert was excited about it just proves that he was inexperienced in working with dry anthrax powders. His boss, General Parker, stated that he was.
Everything in this section of Preston's book shows that they were working with something they had never seen before -- dry anthrax powders.
They mistakenly believed it required some kind of "trick" to make the spores jump around.
You might claim this makes them "baffoons," but all it does is show that they are human. When confronted with something new in a time of crisis, they'll imagine all sorts of terrible things are going on.