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Campsite media the bench.

At the same time that Bruce Ivan's friends and family were mourning his death, sharing stories and memories, another group was reeling from his suicide. The Amerithrax squad.

I'm not sure the entirety of the FBI task force cried like I did, but everyone took it hard.

Rachel Carlson Lieber was the Department of Justice attorney assigned to the squad.

There was no joy in Mudville at all. It was very much the opposite to a person. Very much the opposite.

But their sadness was different from that of Bruce's close friends. Here's Vince Lisi and Ed Montuth, the lead investigators on the case.

The outcome wasn't what we had hoped for, but we tried to pursue it in a manner that would get us to the outcome that would be best for all. Meaning plead guilty and or go to trial.

Go to trial.

If we went to the first possible ending, is him committing suicide? Yeah. Why? Because we'd never get the day in court.

The FBI felt like they'd had the rug pulled out from under them. Our producer asked Vincent Ed if it angered them to end the case without closure.

Does it anger you guys?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Christ was not only me, but Tom Delafera spent eight plus years of his life and never, never got it into court. You know, it's gotta be really frustrating to a guy like that. Actually, it's probably closer to seven and a half, but yeah.

Tom Delafera, the US postal service investigator.

Yeah, it was a very tough time. And what do you do the day after clean up?

Well, not quite. The FBI had put too many man hours into the case to just let things fizzle out. Now, they couldn't legally charge a dead person with a crime, and they couldn't try their case in court, but they could take all the evidence they'd collected over the years and put it before the press. That way, at least they'd be showing the american people that the FBI had done their job, that they'd caught the killer.

It's our case, and we want people to trust us, that we got it right. And you should be able to say, yes, this was the guy. Here's all the proof. And to make sure that people knew what happened.

From campsite media and stony music Entertainment Im Josh Dean, and this is cover up the anthrax threat episode eight, reasonable doubt. One week after Bruce was pronounced dead and seven whole years after the anthrax laced letters were mailed out, the FBI called reporters into a conference room at the Department of Justice.

Good afternoon. I'm Jeff Taylor, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia. We stand here today firmly convinced that we have a person who committed those attacks, and we are confident that had this gone to trial, we would have proved him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

We played some of this press conference in episode one when we said that even though most Americans know about the anthrax attacks, few remember this address on national tv. Part of that is because, well, formally accusing Bruce Ivins after his death was pretty bold, considering that Ivins would never actually get to mount his defense and that the american people would never see any evidence that could exonerate him.

There was some event at WFO, Rachel Lieber again, and I had a prominent national reporter from a prominent media outlet say to me, so do you think he did it? And I said, no. You know, we just blamed the dead guy. He's like what? I was like, of course. I thought, what are you talking about? Like, that was what people were thinking. The point was not because he killed himself, that's proof that he did it. He killed himself, which is tragic. Let us tell you all the proof we had that demonstrates that he did it.

Ordinarily, we do not publicly disclose evidence against a suspect who has not been charged, in part because of the presumption of innocence, but because of the extraordinary and justified public interest in this investigation. Today we are compelled to take the extraordinary step of providing an overview of some recent developments as well as some of our conclusions.

Let'S take a look at what the FBI had against Bruce, as well as some information that wasn't included in the press conference.

Now, turning to the evidence. First, the parent material of the anthrax spores used in the attacks was a single flask of spores, known as RMR 1029, that was created and solely maintained by Doctor Ivins at USamridge.

This was the bedrock of the FBI's case. It was the piece of evidence that turned them on to Bruce in the first place, that the anthrax in the letters was a genetic match for the anthrax in Bruce's flask. Investigators said that no one received material from that flask without going through Doctor Ivins, and that they were able to rule out everyone else who'd ever used that flask.

Second, Doctor Ivins was one of a handful of scientists with the capability to create spores of the concentration and purity used in the attacks.

It's true that Bruce was one of the world's foremost anthrax scientists and was familiar with the processes used to create highly refined anthrax in the letters. But this leaves out one important detail. The anthrax in the letters was a powder, a dry powder. Eusamirid has never worked with dry spores, but several other labs in the US were secretly experimenting with them at the time. The FBI says they ruled out those labs because they had a buddy system. Scientists there couldn't work with anthrax alone.

Third, in the days leading up to each of the mailings, the documents make clear that Doctor Ivins was working inordinate hours, alone at night and on the weekend in the lab where the flask of spores and production equipment were stored.

But when journalists from frontline took another look at those time cards and obtained more records from USamridge, they found that Bruce's hours hadn't actually spiked significantly prior to the attacks. Besides that, FBI investigators noted that there was a general culture at Usamir of spending long hours in the lab at odd times of the night.

In addition, he had submitted a questionable sample of anthrax from his flask of parent spores to the FBI, presumably to mislead investigators. He had also made far reaching efforts to blame others and divert attention away from himself.

But for years, Bruce believed he was helping the FBI solve this case. And besides that, investigators had been trying to turn Bruce's colleagues against him and told Bruce that his friends had betrayed him.

Fifth, as reflected in the court documents, Doctor Ivins had a history of mental health problems and was facing a difficult time professionally. In the summer and fall, of 2001 and feared that he might not be able to control his behavior.

Investigators knew that Bruce suffered from severe mental health issues, like his obsessions over the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and chronic depression. Bruce had also admitted that he took long drives without telling his family, that he sometimes woke up with his shoes on and his keys beside him and didn't know where he'd driven the night before. The FBI also claimed that Bruce had a long history of sending letters to colleagues, congresspeople and tv news anchors under false names. But remember, this is all still in circumstantial territory.

I'll conclude with one more point. Based on the analysis, we were able to conclude that the envelopes used in the mailings were very likely sold at a post office in the Frederick, Maryland area in 2001.

In 2006, the FBI noticed there was a slight defect in the printed stamp on the anthrax letters. They managed to trace that defect back to three post offices in northern Virginia, Elkton, Cumberland and Frederick, where Bruce kept a PO box. But if Bruce was as cunning and willing to take long drives as the FBI claimed, why would he use envelopes that he bought at his local post office?

With respect to motive, the troubled nature of Doctor ivins and possible motive is his concern about the end of the vaccination program, and the concerns had been raised. And one theory is that by launching these attacks, he creates a situation, a scenario where people all of a sudden realize the need to have this vaccine.

Now, out of all the allegations, this last one about funding struck Bruce's colleagues as the most ridiculous. Pat Worsham worked closely with Bruce and knew the drill.

I never bought that argument. Funding has been cyclic for the whole time I've been at U. Sanford. Anthrax was up, anthrax was down. Anthrax was up, anthrax was down. And it always came around full circle. And I think we all knew that. And certainly Bruce had seen to go up and down more times than I had.

Jeff Adamovich was another of Bruce's colleagues at USAMRiD. He'd helped patent a drug to fight plague and knew how much money was on the line.

You know what my grand total was as a financial reward for developing that antibody? Take a guess. Just.

I'm just curious to see where.

Well, I'm guessing it's not a million dollars, given what you're saying, but $5,200 before taxes.

What did you buy with it? Yeah, exactly.

Went to the movies. But no matter whether the funding issues are meaningful or totally insignificant, once you line up all the evidence against Bruce, Ivins, you'll notice something missing, something pretty substantial. Direct evidence. Every piece of the FBI's evidence only suggested that Bruce could have committed the crime. They didn't have any proof that he actually did. No fingerprints, DNA, handwriting matches, surveillance footage. Nothing that actually put Bruce in the room with the anthrax letters. The journalists at the press conference asked about this.

This is obviously, at this point, a circumstantial case. You feel a strong circumstantial case. What direct evidence do you have? For instance, do you have any tape.

That was used on the envelope that.

Was recovered from his home? Again, it's a chain. It's a chain of evidentiary items that, assembled together, leads to one reasonable conclusion, and that is, Doctor Ivins mailed that anthrax in those envelopes from that mailbox in Princeton. Yes.

Like a gas receipt or that shows that he was there. I mean, it actually proves that he was in that area.

We don't have that piece of direct evidence you mentioned. Thousands of prosecutors in thousands of courthouses across this country every day prove cases beyond a reasonable doubt using circumstantial evidence. So, again, circumstantial evidence. Sure, some of it is, but it's compelling evidence. And our view is we are confident it would have helped us prove this case against Doctor Ivans beyond a reasonable doubt.

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Joe Persiccini, who worked in the FBI's Washington field office, suggested there was another reason agents were sharing this information about Bruce, the victims.

I was able to be with director Mueller this morning as he met with the families of those who died and many of the surviving victims of these attacks, I was able to once again offer my sincere and heartfelt condolences and provide them some of the answers they have waited for. With such patience, and understanding.

For seven years, the Amarathrax squad knew they'd never see their case in court or the perp behind bars. So the least they could do was give the victims of this attack some closure. Right? But that's not what some of the victims felt. Here's Jay Carson, who was in Tom Daschle's office when a letter was opened. It was sort of a gut punch when the guy who they believe did it got the opportunity to kill himself and not have to face the music for killing two people and really messing up the lives of a lot of others for a really long time, not to mention costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Casey Chamberlain, the intern at NBC's Nightly News who'd fallen sick, had a similar reaction.

I think we all had. You know, we'll never know, but I have to take them at their word. And, you know, hopefully there is no other person out there that could have done this. I try to sort of live every day and move on and hope that that's not the case and that if Mister Ivins was the perpetrator, then now he's gone, and I just have to accept that and move on. You know?

Others were left unconvinced by the FBI's argument entirely, like Laura Petru, who worked in Daschle's office and received regular briefings from the FBI in the years following the attacks.

They may well be right, but they never convinced me they were right. And I definitely was never convinced that they could prove in court that Bruce Ivins did it. I became convinced that we were never going to know. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm not sure they're interested in any new evidence. I think they just think we got our guy, and that's it.

Many people could tell the FBI's report raised more questions than it answered. And there's something pretty convenient about closing a case after the suspect's dead. They can insist that a jury would have found him guilty, but would they have? And juries aside, now that the FBI has closed the case, how can we be sure that Ivins was the guy?

Yes, the New York Times didn't buy at all. Fine. But it's also, we live in 2021, the land of the conspiracy theory, right? Conspiracy theories didn't just, you know, spontaneously appear in the past two years. There are roots of that that go back a long time.

Now, if it might be tempting to dismiss a lot of the naysaying and counterarguments as baseless conspiracy theories, but it wasn't just cranks and tinfoil hats saying this stuff.

In September of 2008, the FBI asked the National Academy of Sciences to convene a committee to conduct an independent review of the scientific approaches used during the anthrax investigation.

The National Academy of Sciences is the country's premier scientific association. The FBI had commissioned a report from the NAS to review the science used in building the case against Bruce Ivins.

We also were not asked to, and will not offer any view on the guilt or innocence of any person or persons.

The primary task was assessing whether the FBI could definitively say where the anthrax in the letters had come from. The FBI had received hundreds of samples of anthrax from labs around the world and, using groundbreaking forensic techniques, managed to find a match RMR 1029, Bruce Ivansflask. That was the foundation of the FBI's case against Bruce.

But the committee's primary finding is it is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion about the origins of the B anthracis in the mailings based on the scientific evidence alone. The scientific link between the letter material and the flask number, RMR 1029, is not as conclusive as stated in the DOJ investigative summary.

The NAS found there was too much uncertainty in the scientific methods to claim that RMR 1029 was the definitive source of the anthrax in the letters, which put the FBIs entire case on shaky ground. Not only was RMR 1029 shared widely across several labs, the spores that originally made up that flask actually came from two other labs, Dugway proving ground in Utah and Battelle labs in Ohio. There were so many lingering questions with the investigation that Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, was called to testify before Congress where Representative Jerry Nadler asked him about those two labs specifically.

There are only a handful of facilities in the United States which have been publicly identified as having the experienced personnel and equipment necessary to make anything approaching such an anthrax powder, including the US Army's Dugway proving grounds in the Battell Memorial Institute in Jefferson, Ohio, a CIA contractor. Were those facilities ever targets in the investigation we using? Target is somewhat a weighted word in terms of. In terms of what we looked at in the course of the investigation, you can assume that we looked at every laboratory in the United States and several overseas that had both the type of the Ames anthrax. If these facilities were looked at, could you tell us how and why they were ruled out? Since obviously they zeroed in on Fort Detrick and on Mister Ivins, I would have to get back to you on individual facilities. I hope you will get back to us relatively quickly.

Years before Mueller spoke before Congress or the FBI held a press conference, investigators on the Amerithrax squad were raising these same concerns.

In hindsight, I'm not comfortable that we and the FBI uncovered everything relating to what I would call the US military industrial complex work with anthrax and the aim strain.

Rick Lambert was the lead investigator on the case for years and was most infamously, in charge of the Stephen Hatfield fiasco. During his time at the helm, he made several trips to the Pentagon, meeting with high level Department of Defense officials.

Asking them, hey, we need to know about any black programs you're operating, any kind of experimental programs you're operating that have to do with bio defense and particularly anthrax so we can talk to these people. And, you know, the response uniformly was, we're not doing anything but defensive work, you know, trying to develop vaccines. We're not doing any offensive work. We're not doing any types of experimentation. There's nothing to report. We don't have anything to tell you.

But years later, Rick found out they weren't telling him the truth.

Since I've retired, there has been an investigative journalist who brought to my attention a budget request from the year 2000 by the Defense Department seeking authorization and funding to work with encapsulated anthrax. And that's very frustrating to me.

It was one of the many reasons that Rick wasn't comfortable with the FBI closing the case on Bruce Ivins.

I come down on it that today I do not know who committed the anthrax attacks. Bruce Ivan certainly could have. If he did, he used some sort of a production protocol that no one has ever seen before, and his colleagues say he did not have the capability to produce. But, you know, for right now, what's known, unfortunately, is mainly that information that's been leaked to the media. You know, it's like looking at an elephant and just looking at the trunk and trying to understand what the entire animal looks like. And I keep saying this, and I'm sorry for repeating myself, but I'm not saying Ivans is not the guy who did it. Ivans might be the guy. All I'm saying is that the american people have not seen the totality of evidence in the case. What they have been treated to thus far is a highly selective presentation of the facts that indicate Ivan's guilt. They have not seen the evidence that would be consistent with Ivan's innocence.

This is all evidence that would have been presented in court had Bruce lived to make a defense at trial.

And so when the Justice Department gets up on national television and says, ivan's is the guy who did it, we're confident we could have obtained a conviction in a court of law with proof beyond a reasonable doubt. I think that's disingenuous, because I don't think that we could have. The Hargan women seemed to have it all.

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When Rick Lambert left the Amaranthrax squad in 2006 and took another job at the field office in Knoxville, the case had already taken a toll on his personal life. For the years that Rick was living in DC working on anthrax, his wife was back in San Diego.

That's one of the mistakes that I made in the case. I should have kept the household together. The old expression, absence makes the heart grow fonder. That is true to a point. And after that point, the absence kind of begins to tear at the fabric of the marital relationship. And, you know, as a result of that absence, my marriage ultimately failed. So, you know, it's just the absence. And, you know, her mind was not consumed every waking moment with marathrax. You know, she had a normal job, and so in the evenings and things, she's at home and she's by herself. You know, that gets old after four years.

What would she say to you when you're on the phone with her from DC?

When do you think this is gonna end? I don't know. I don't know.

And that conversation over and over for four years.

Exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'll simply say that I was lucky to be married to her the years that I was with.

Her.

Before Rick left the amarathrax investigation. He wanted to do one last thing.

You know, one of the things that I also did back in June of 2006 before leaving was to document all of what I viewed as the areas of mismanagement or missteps. It simply outlines the difficulties that we encountered in trying to run this investigation using the new paradigm of managing major cases directly out of FBI headquarters. Most of it is focused on resource constraints that occurred repeatedly with the torpid pace of examinations by the FBI laboratory. But most of it just concerns this pervasive shortage of resources and the consequences that were associated with that.

He felt that there were structural issues with how the FBI managed the case, issues that kept him from making significant progress. He wrote up a report nearly 2000 pages long and sent it to the deputy director.

My thought was, you know, I just need to document where we had missteps in this case so that those missteps don't get repeated. And once I submitted that report, I didn't get any feedback on it. No acknowledgement that it came in. I mean, there was nothing.

The report disappeared into the federal bureaucracy and eventually faded from Rick's mind until the national press office gave him a.

Call and said, hey, there's going to be a 60 Minutes episode about the Amerithrax case and we're just giving you a heads up. I said, okay, I'll take a look at it.

Lambert wrote this memo protesting that policy which is known as stovepiping, where different teams of investigators are not allowed to exchange information. Lambert's memo says that would inhibit our ability to connect the dots, just as it had in the lead up to 911.

In the episode, pictures of Rick's report flashed across the screen, an internal document criticizing one of the FBI's highest profile cases. It was never meant to be seen outside the bureau and was now being broadcast into millions of american homes.

You know, the reality is, is that you file a whistleblower complaint in the FBI and you're immediately Persona non grata. I mean, it's just politically, it's something that is not done. I mean, FBI agents are taught from the day they entered the academy at Quantico that one thing you never do is embarrass the bureau. And you hear this over and over again throughout your career, don't embarrass the bureau. And I think that I embarrassed the bureau.

What is the feeling? Okay, so first is surprise.

And then my feeling was, this is not good. This is not going to end well.

What did you do?

There was nothing. There was nothing I could do.

Several years after having his memo published by 60 Minutes, Rick was fired from his new job at the Department of Energy. An FBI lawyer claimed that since Rick's job involved working closely with FBI agents, he was in violation of federal conflict of interest laws.

There was no conflict of interest. There had never been a conflict of interest. And what that allegation did when it was made by the chief ethics officer is it triggered a year long investigation by the DOj office of the inspector general, which ultimately cleared me and exonerated me of any kind of wrongdoing or any kind of conflict of interest. But by that point, the damage had been done because it's. Hey, that's the guy over there who's under investigation for violating conflict of interest statutes. And so, you know, there's a stigma associated with allegations that trigger an investigation, even when those allegations are false and turn out to be and are proven to be unsubstantiated. And you don't really ever overcome that professionally.

In 2015, Rick launched a lawsuit against the FBI, accusing them of ruining his professional reputation as payback for his dissent on the Amerithrax investigation. The suit also accused the Bureau of trying to railroad the prosecution of Ivins, despite a large amount of evidence pointing away from Ivans guilt, evidence that was never shared with the public. Unfortunately for Rick, the suit was dismissed in court. By this point, Rick's career was stained, and his perspective on the justness of the american system had been turned upside down.

The Justice Department very elegantly came back and said, well, your honor, this is not a case about legal malpractice. And under the principle of sovereign immunity, he cannot sue us for defamation. And sovereign immunity is a principle that we brought over from England with us when we formed this country. It's based upon the principle that the king can do no wrong, because the king is appointed by God, and therefore, anything the king does is right, no matter what the consequences are. And you can't sue the king.

The experience taught Rick something important. The same laws and institutions that have been put in place to protect the american people were just as capable of corroding the democratic system. When us government officials wanted to make it seem like the anthrax letters had come from enemies overseas in order to drum up support for a war, they did. When they wanted to cast suspicion on various people of interest to show that they were doing their job, they did that, too. Now, nearly a decade after Rick Lambert had led the Amarathrax investigation, he found himself on the other side of the FBI machine, not so far away from the position that Stephen Hatfill Earshad shake and Bruce Ivins had been in, as well as so many others. And he learned exactly the same lesson.

The bottom line is, the government can say whatever it wants to say about you. The government can falsely and publicly accuse you of committing a crime, and there's nothing that you can do. And there is no recourse. There's no recourse that you have.

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This is cover up the conspiracy tapes. Cover up the anthrax threat is hosted by me, Josh Dean. The series was created and produced by Ben Robbins. It was written by Rajiv Gola. Our senior producer is Emile Klein. Additional production by Abacar Adan and Natalia Winkelman. Emily Martinez is our story editor and executive producer. Our theme song was created by Ira Wolf Tootin. Sound design by Ewan Lytramuin and Bart Warshaw, with support from Emil Klein. The series was fact checked by Jordan Reed and Callie Hitchcock. Special thanks to David Shin and Sue Ziza at Radio Wave Studios and also to our operations team, Doug Slayn, Ashley Warren and Destiny Dingle. Campsite's executive producers are me, Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff and Matt Scherr. If you're enjoying the show, please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. It helps other listeners find the show and maybe recommend it to a friend while you're at it. Thanks for listening. See you next time.