Justice filing raises questions in anthrax case

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department has called into question a key pillar of the FBI’s case against Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist accused of mailing anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and terrorized Congress a decade ago.

Shortly after Ivins committed suicide in 2008, federal investigators announced that they had identified him as the mass murderer who sent the letters to members of Congress and the news media. The case was circumstantial, with federal officials arguing that the scientist had the means, motive and opportunity to make the deadly powder at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md.

Now, however, Justice Department lawyers have acknowledged in court papers that the sealed area in Ivins’ lab – the so-called hot suite – didn’t contain the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder that floated through congressional buildings and post offices in the fall of 2001.

The government said it continued to believe that Ivins was “more likely than not” the killer. But the filing in a Florida court didn’t explain where or how Ivins could have made the powder, saying only that his secure lab “did not have the specialized equipment … that would be required to prepare the dried spore preparations that were used in the letters.”

The government’s statements deepen the questions about the case against Ivins, who killed himself before he was charged with a crime. Searches of his car and home in 2007 found no anthrax spores, and the FBI’s eight-year, $100 million investigation never provided direct evidence that he mailed the letters or identified another location where he might have secretly dried the anthrax.

Earlier this year, a report by the National Academy of Sciences questioned the genetic analysis that had linked a flask of anthrax stored in Ivins’ office to the anthrax in the letters.

The papers were filed July 15 in federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Division who are defending the government against a wrongful-death suit brought in 2003 by Maureen Stevens, the widow of Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the Sun tabloid. Stevens was the first to die from a tainted letter, and his family has accused federal officials of lax procedures that allowed someone to make a germ weapon using anthrax from a government laboratory.

In asserting that Ivins was the culprit, criminal investigators pointed to his access to the specialized equipment at the laboratory. Officials drew up elaborate charts showing that Ivins’ time in the hot suite spiked in the weeks before the letters were mailed. But Ivins’ colleagues have said in depositions for the Stevens case that the powder couldn’t have been made in the lab.

A Justice Department spokesman shed little light Monday on the seeming shift in positions, saying that investigators still think that Ivins produced the anthrax at Fort Detrick and are unaware of evidence that he did so elsewhere.

The government lawyers have sought to counter Maureen Stevens’ allegations of negligence at Fort Detrick, including inadequate controls over anthrax stocks, by suggesting that the anthrax in the letters may not have been produced there.

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said Monday that the court filing didn’t contradict the government’s conclusion that Ivins sent the letters. He said the lawyers argued that “Ivins’ actions were not foreseeable to his supervisors at USAMRIID,” because he didn’t have the equipment to dry the spores in his containment laboratory, “and thus the United States should not be held liable for his actions.”

“To clarify, this statement was intended to relate to the specific containment laboratory” where Ivins kept a flask of liquid anthrax with genetic markers similar to those found in the letters, Boyd said.