Timothy Birdnow

Here is something of which I was unaware; Robert Mueller (along with James Comey) completely bungled the Anthrax investigation in the aftermath of the attacks.

According to Carl M. Cannon of Real Clear Politics:

"The third and most important factor tempering my enthusiasm for the new special prosecutor is that Comey and Mueller badly bungled the biggest case they ever handled. They botched the investigation of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that took five lives and infected 17 other people, shut down the U.S. Capitol and Washington’s mail system, solidified the Bush administration’s antipathy for Iraq, and eventually, when the facts finally came out, made the FBI look feckless, incompetent, and easily manipulated by outside political pressure.

This, too, was an enormously complex case. But here are some facts: Despite the jihadist slogans accompanying the mailed anthrax, it had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or any foreign element; the FBI ignored a 2002 tip from a scientific colleague of the actual anthrax killer, who turned out to be a Fort Detrick scientist named Bruce Edwards Ivins; the reason is that they had quickly obsessed on an innocent man named Steven Hatfill; the bureau was bullied into focusing on the government scientist by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy (whose office, along with that of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, was targeted by an anthrax-laced letter) and was duped into focusing on Hatfill by two sources — a conspiracy-minded college professor with a political agenda who’d never met Hatfill and by Nicholas Kristof, who put her conspiracy theories in the paper while mocking the FBI for not arresting Hatfill.

In truth, Hatfill was an implausible suspect from the outset. He was a virologist who never handled anthrax, which is a bacterium. (Ivins, by contrast, shared ownership of anthrax patents, was diagnosed as having paranoid personality disorder, and had a habit of stalking and threatening people with anonymous letters — including the woman who provided the long-ignored tip to the FBI).

So what evidence did the FBI have against Hatfill? There was none, so the agency did a Hail Mary, importing two bloodhounds from California whose handlers claimed could sniff the scent of the killer on the anthrax-tainted letters. These dogs were shown to Hatfill, who promptly petted them. When the dogs responded favorably, their handlers told the FBI that they’d "alerted” on Hatfill and that he must be the killer.

You’d think that any good FBI agent would have kicked these quacks in the fanny and found their dogs a good home. Or at least checked news accounts of criminal cases in California where these same dogs had been used against defendants who’d been convicted — and later exonerated. As Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times investigative reporter David Willman detailed in his authoritative book on the case, a California judge who’d tossed out a murder conviction based on these sketchy canines called the prosecution’s dog handler "as biased as any witness that this court has ever seen.”

Instead, Mueller, who micromanaged the anthrax case and fell in love with the dubious dog evidence, personally assured Ashcroft and presumably George W. Bush that in Steven Hatfill the bureau had its man. Comey, in turn, was asked by a skeptical Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz if Hatfill was another Richard Jewell — the security guard wrongly accused of the Atlanta Olympics bombing. Comey replied that he was "absolutely certain” they weren’t making a mistake.

Such certitude seems to be Comey’s default position in his professional life. Mueller didn’t exactly distinguish himself with contrition, either. In 2008, after Ivins committed suicide as he was about to be apprehended for his crimes, and the Justice Department had formally exonerated Hatfill — and paid him $5.82 million in a legal settlement — Mueller could not be bothered to walk across the street to attend the press conference announcing the case’s resolution. When reporters did ask him about it, Mueller was graceless. "I do not apologize for any aspect of the investigation,” he said, adding that it would be erroneous "to say there were mistakes.”

End excerpt.

I have always suspected that the government was wrong on this being an act by either Hatfill or Ivins and suspected a real terrorist connection, but lost interest in the case when nothing seemed to happen. Now we know there was more happening.

And the Boss Hog of this was none other than Robert Mueller, the guy now persuing Donald J. Trump.

I am convinced Mueller is noting but a swamp creature, and a bad one. Read my thoughts on Mueller here here, and here.

Be prepared for a good old fashioned Charlie Foxtrot with this Mueller investigation.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:58 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 785 words, total size 6 kb.