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Senator Blasts FBI Anthrax Investigation
A senior Republican senator this week blasted the “dead-ends and a lack of progress” in the FBI’s investigation of the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people, the Washington Times reported (see GSN, Sept. 29). “There are numerous and serious questions that need to be answered about both the investigation itself and how the FBI has handled it,” Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) stated in a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. “The FBI’s refusal to brief Congress over the last several years is an outrageous response to reasonable requests at getting to the bottom of the attacks,” added Grassley, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. No one has been charged in the case, which has encompassed 9,000 FBI interviews and 6,000 subpoenas. A team of 17 FBI agents and 10 postal inspectors continues to pursue the investigation (see GSN, Sept. 25). Grassley said the FBI might have an “institutional resistance to criticism and dissent” regarding its investigation. The agency has directed much of its resources in the investigation since 2001 to connecting former U.S. Army scientist Steven Hatfill to the mailings, Grassley said. The Justice Department has identified Hatfill as a “person of interest” in the case; he has responded with defamation lawsuits against the agency and the New York Times (see GSN, Oct. 24). “Given the allegations about FBI leaks related to Hatfill and its similar leaks related to Richard Jewell in the [1996 Olympics] Centennial Park Bombing Case, for the FBI to withhold information from Congress for fear of leaks seems a bit hypocritical, to say the least,” Grassley wrote. He asked whether the number of persons or laboratories of interest had been winnowed down, the Times reported (Jerry
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