Justice Dept. Set To Share Details In Anthrax Case

Justice Dept. Set to Share Details in Anthrax Case

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/wa...ax.html?ref=us

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE
Published: August 5, 2008

WASHINGTON — In the face of growing questions about the strength of the evidence, the Justice Department is preparing to declare the 2001 anthrax case solved and to make its case publicly on Wednesday against a military scientist who killed himself after investigators linked him to the attacks, federal law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation are particularly eager to close the case and publicly rebut accusations from defenders of the scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, that the bureau may have hounded an innocent man into committing suicide.

But the legal process for effectively closing the case — and unsealing court records that are secret under grand jury rules — has proved to be a slow one. Justice Department officials plan to ask Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia to make documents from the investigation public, but they first want to brief relatives of many of the 5 people killed and 17 injured in the anthrax attacks.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said Tuesday that the authorities had a “legal and moral obligation” to speak with the victims’ families before releasing information publicly. The Justice Department plans to brief the families and release the documents on Wednesday, although no announcement has been scheduled, Mr. Mukasey and other officials said.

Three victims said the Justice Department alerted them on Tuesday to a briefing for the families in Washington on Wednesday.

Patrick D. O’Donnell, who worked as a magazine sorter in New Jersey when he was sickened by the anthrax, was on his way to Washington on Tuesday to attend the gathering. Mr. O’Donnell seemed confident, based on the news he has heard, that the F.B.I. had solved the case.

“It has taken a long time,” he said. “I guess they sat on these people long enough that they broke them. It is hard to believe it is almost over.”

Officials said Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, might speak to some of the victims — a reflection of the importance the bureau attaches to the seven-year-old case. Members of Congress have demanded that Mr. Mueller explain why the case remained unsolved for so long. In June, the Justice Department agreed to pay a settlement worth $4.6 million to another scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, after publicly pursuing him as a suspect for years.

Law enforcement officials would not discuss many details of the investigation despite intense news media interest from around the world.

“What we have seen over the past few days has been a mix of improper disclosures of partial information mixed with inaccurate information and then drawn into unfounded conclusions,” said Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Justice Department. “None of that serves the victims, their families or the public. Likewise, we will not discuss reports or details on the timing of briefings to the public or victims and their families. We will provide such details to the press at the appropriate time, and not before.”

Dr. Ivins, who worked on anthrax vaccines for 18 years at the military research facility at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., took a fatal overdose of Tylenol and codeine last week at his home near the base. He had been under investigation for more than a year in the anthrax killings and had recently been told that the Justice Department was on the verge of seeking an indictment against him on capital murder charges.

Federal officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the case remains under seal, said they were confident that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax killer and that he had acted alone. They said that new scientific methods had allowed the F.B.I. to trace the genetic makeup of the anthrax sample to Dr. Ivins and a pool of about 10 other people who had access to a particular supply of anthrax at Fort Detrick. Other evidence, much of it still undisclosed, amounted to a strong circumstantial case against him, the officials said. Perhaps the most provocative piece of evidence to emerge publicly is the testimony of a therapist who treated Dr. Ivins in recent months and described him as homicidal.

But Dr. Ivins’s lawyer has asserted his innocence, and a number of colleagues at Fort Detrick have defended him, saying that his recent mental state and his suicide were the result of many months of near-constant surveillance and scrutiny by the F.B.I., not a reflection of his guilt.

Some government officials have also questioned the strength of the bureau’s case and said they were eager to see the grand jury documents.

One Congressional official briefed on the case said he was not persuaded that the F.B.I. had made a credible case in singling out Dr. Ivins in the group of people at Fort Detrick who had access to anthrax samples linked to the 2001 attacks.

The F.B.I. may be able to point to odd behavior on the part of Dr. Ivins, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is under seal. But he said the attention the bureau focused on Dr. Ivins was reminiscent of a past misstep: “It looks like what they did to Hatfill. Ivins was the weirdest one.”

Friends and colleagues, meanwhile, have offered a fuller account of Dr. Ivins’s difficult last nine months, saying that he was so distraught by the F.B.I.’s constant scrutiny that he began drinking excessively and had to be hospitalized twice for periods of weeks for substance abuse.

A friend and fellow member of a 12-step program for alcoholics who spent hours counseling him said Dr. Ivins, who at least in recent years had not been a drinker, went rapidly downhill after the F.B.I. searched his house and questioned his wife and children last November.

The friend, a fellow scientist who spoke on the condition that he not be named, said Dr. Ivins had repeatedly denied sending the anthrax letters and was particularly upset at what he considered to be the F.B.I.’s aggressive questioning of his children, Andrew and Amanda, both 24, as investigators tried to get them to turn on their father.

“He said, ‘I’m innocent of these charges,’ ” the friend said. “He was absolutely shocked they were going after him like this.” Through much of the year, the friend said, Dr. Ivins was drinking large amounts of vodka, combined with Ambien and prescription tranquilizers. After being found unconscious in his home in March, he spent four weeks in a treatment program at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md. After that he spent another four weeks in treatment at the Thomas B. Finan Center in Cumberland, Md., being released to go home to Frederick in late May.

Judging from periodic phone calls in which Dr. Ivins often appeared to be intoxicated, the friend said he believed Dr. Ivins was drinking again between May and July, when he was admitted for two weeks to a psychiatric facility.

Law enforcement officials said they were confident that the F.B.I. had handled the investigation appropriately and had used proper procedures in questioning witnesses and keeping Dr. Ivins under surveillance.