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The Justice Department released nearly 100 documents Tuesday that it used to falsely link scientist Steven J. Hatfill to the 2001 anthrax attacks. Search warrants and documents detailing what was recovered show the FBI seized clothing, financial records, VHS tapes, books and other papers from Hatfill's home in Frederick, Md., his car, and a locker he rented in Ocala, Fla.The court documents also show the FBI searched the car and Washington apartment of an unnamed person, seizing notebooks, files, envelopes, hair brushes and bobby pins. The evidence presumably belongs to Hatfill's then-girlfriend Peck Chegne. Hatfill originally was named a person...

U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings’ Washington, D.C., office was shuttered in 2001 after anthrax spores were found, so he’s “very sensitive” to the investigation into the crime, he said. Now, Cummings said he supports a review of the investigation. U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., proposed legislation in September to create a congressional commission to investigate the attacks and the federal government’s response. “Whatever we have to do to get to the bottom of this anthrax issue, we need to do it,” Cummings said. Holt’s bipartisan commission would mirror the 9/11 commission and make recommendations on how to prevent such attacks and...

U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings’ Washington, D.C., office was shuttered in 2001 after anthrax spores were found, so he’s “very sensitive” to the investigation into the crime, he said. Now, Cummings said he supports a review of the investigation. U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., proposed legislation in September to create a congressional commission to investigate the attacks and the federal government’s response. “Whatever we have to do to get to the bottom of this anthrax issue, we need to do it,” Cummings said. Holt’s bipartisan commission would mirror the 9/11 commission and make recommendations on how to prevent such attacks and...

A federal judge today ordered the Justice Department to release documents that explain why investigators suspected Steven J. Hatfill in the 2001 anthrax mailings. Hatfill has since been exonerated.

It was an open-and-shut case, the FBI said. But three months after agents pinned the post-9/11 anthrax mailings on Army scientist Bruce Ivins - who committed suicide as the FBI closed in on him - his former colleagues have approached a lawyer to sue the feds for fingering the wrong man...

The FBI has posted a $100,000 reward for help in finding who sent identical letters containing what turned out to be a harmless white powder to banking offices across the country. All 50 letters, which were sent between Oct. 17 and 18, were postmarked Amarillo, Texas. FBI today released the text of the letters on its Web site: "STEAL TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE'S MONEY AND NOT EXPECT REPERCUSSIONS. IT'S PAYBACK TIME. WHAT YOU JUST BREATHED IN WILL KILL YOU WITHIN 10 DAYS. THANK (Redacted) AND THE FDIC FOR YOUR DEMISE."

Panic swept America. By including a deadly bioagent in something we welcome into our homes and workplaces every day — the mundane U.S. mail — someone (or several someones) evoked the same sorts of fears provoked two decades earlier by the Tylenol poisonings in Chicago. Anthrax mailings eventually killed five people and sickened 17 others..So: Was Bruce Ivins the one and only anthrax killer? Or is he a convenient scapegoat for embarrassed investigators who, having wrongly suspected Hatfill, don't deserve the public's confidence that they got this right?

A recent New York Times editorial criticizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation about its seven-year probe into the mailing of anthrax-laden letters to members of Congress, prominent media figures and others is a direct attempt to plant doubt in the minds of its diminishing readership. The editorial read, “None of the investigators’ major assertions, however, have been tested in cross-examination . . .” Sorry, that test is moot when the suspect kills himself. Dr. Bruce Ivins, a mentally unbalanced scientist at the U.S. Army’s laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland, killed himself once he was informed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office...

Former USA Today reporter Toni Locy urged the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington on Thursday not to throw out her case seeking a reporter’s privilege to keep her sources confidential. Locy became embroiled in the legal battle after reporting about Steven Hatfill, the former Army scientist who was investigated in the 2001 anthrax attacks but whose name has since been cleared. When Locy refused to give up her confidential sources in Hatfill's ensuing Privacy Act suit against the government, the U.S. District Court in D.C. held her in contempt. She appealed that decision to the Court of Appeals.

"I believe there are others involved, either as accessories before or accessories after the fact," Mr. Leahy said. "I believe there are others who can be charged with murder." Mr. Leahy's skepticism was echoed by GOP Sens. Arlen Specter (Pa.) and Charles E. Grassley (Iowa)...

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department made public on Friday a plan to expand the tools the Federal Bureau of Investigation can use to investigate suspicions of terrorism inside the United States, even without any direct evidence of wrongdoing.......

In a letter to Mueller sent ahead of a Sept. 16 hearing on "troubling issues" about the FBI, panel chairman Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) asked Mueller to answer several questions about the bureau's anthrax investigation. Conyers asked for the identities of White House officials who wanted the agency to link the anthrax attacks to al Qaeda or Iraq, why army scientist Bruce Ivins retained his security clearance at Fort Detrick despite being a suspect in the probe, and why another Fort Detrick scientist, Steven Hatfill, was the focus of the investigation despite evidence pointing elsewhere...

Federal and local law enforcement agencies today issued a $20,000 reward for information about a 2005 anthrax hoax at Savannah River Site. The Atlanta Field Office of the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office jointly issued the reward to aid their investigation into discovering the identity and location of the person initiating the hoax against officials at SRS and the federal Department of Energy, according to an FBI press release.

Investigators were at an impasse when a lucky discovery narrowed the hunt for the culprit who mailed the deadly spores.

On Wednesday, August 8, 2008, the Department of Justice held a news conference announcing that Bruce E. Ivins, a former anthrax researcher for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), was the sole person responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks. Headed by U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor and FBI Assistant Director Joseph Persichini, the presentation was noteworthy for often not answering relevant questions, but instead referring reporters to several dozen court documents they had just been provided. After hurriedly reading one of these documents I decided to hedge my strong conclusion in an essay that the FBI had...

When Norm Covert, a conservative former Fort Detrick public affairs officer, and attorney Barry Kissin, liberal activist opposing Detrick's biolab expansion, agree that Bruce Ivins was not the anthrax killer, either the world's spinning off its axis, or the truth is staring us so hard in the face we'd have to be blind to miss it. Covert's piece this week in thetentacle.com establishes what many in our community, including scientists and support staff at USAMRIID, past and present, know: Bruce Ivins had nothing to do with preparing or sending the anthrax letters. --

HOW QUICKLY we forget. In the aftermath of 9/11, after the memorials, the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and the transit bombings in London and Madrid, the anthrax scare slipped from public consciousness. Now, long articles detail the results of a troubled investigation into the anonymous anthrax-tainted letters of the fall of 2001. With the cruel elegance of a Greek tragedy, Bruce Ivins, the scientific adviser on the matter, became the prime suspect in the case, and its final victim as well, when he killed himself on July 29. Suddenly anthrax is back in the news, and we remember those...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 (UPI) -- The U.S. Justice Department said Friday that Steven Hatfill was not involved in anthrax mailings for which he was listed six years ago as a person of interest. The Justice Department agreed in June to pay $4.6 million to settle Hatfill's lawsuit against the government, but until Friday the government had not exonerated him, The New York Times (NYSE:NYT) reported. "We have concluded, based on laboratory access records, witness accounts and other information, that Dr. Hatfill did not have access to the particular anthrax used in the attacks, and that he was not involved in...

WASHINGTON - Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims. The pressure on Ivins was extreme, a high-risk strategy that has failed the FBI before. The government was determined to find the villain in the 2001 anthrax attacks; it was too many years without a solution to the case that shocked and terrified a post-9/11 nation. The last thing the FBI needed...

We have forgotten so much about the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that many people may not remember the deadly anthrax spores that were mailed to various prominent people in politics and in the media during that time. None of the intended victims was killed by the anthrax but five other people were, including two postal workers, who apparently became victims because they handled the mail containing anthrax spores. In the instant search for someone to blame, biologist Steven J. Hatfill was publicly named as "a person of interest" in the case by government officials. He...