Thanks, you beat me here.
It’s a fascinating article. Ivins’ lawyer was right about the FBI’s “Ivins gave us the wrong strain” story. Also the envelopes are more widespread. Quotes from Rep. Holt saying a recent private briefing raised more doubts, not lessen them.
“For instance, the Justice Department said earlier this month in unsealing court records against Dr. Ivins that he had tried to mislead investigators in 2002 by giving them an anthrax sample that did not appear to have come from his laboratory.
But F.B.I. officials acknowledged at the closed-door briefing, according to people who were there, that the sample Dr. Ivins gave them in 2002 did in fact come from the same strain used in the attacks, but, because of limitations in the bureau’s testing methods and Dr. Ivins’s failure to provide the sample in the format requested, the F.B.I. did not realize that it was a correct match until three years later.
In addition, people who were briefed by the F.B.I. said a batch of misprinted envelopes used in the anthrax attacks — another piece of evidence used to link Dr. Ivins to the attacks — could have been much more widely available than bureau officials had initially led them to believe.
F.B.I. Will Present Scientific Evidence in Anthrax Case to Counter Doubts
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/washington/16anthrax.html?ref=us
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: August 15, 2008