He's "Hat" His "Fill" Of Bushco Screwups

The New York Times reported the following on Saturday…

The Justice Department announced Friday that it would pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army biodefense researcher intensively investigated as a “person of interest” in the deadly anthrax letters of 2001.

The settlement, consisting of $2.825 million in cash and an annuity paying Dr. Hatfill $150,000 a year for 20 years, brings to an end a five-year legal battle that had recently threatened a reporter with large fines for declining to name sources she said she did not recall.

Dr. Hatfill, who worked at the Army’s laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., in the late 1990s, was the subject of a flood of news media coverage beginning in mid-2002, after television cameras showed Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in biohazard suits searching his apartment near the Army base. He was later named a “person of interest” in the case by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, speaking on national television.

This is actually an update to this post from last February, which notes, among other items, that the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention had ended in turmoil in July/August 2001 with no new agreement reached that included international inspections of US government laboratories, and the scare took place in October of that year, implying that an agreement could have averted the tragedy.

The post also tells us that Hatfill left Fort Detrick in 1999, making it highly unlikely that he could have obtained and delivered the anthrax-laced letters.

And if you want to get an indication of the true “Keystone Kops” nature of Bushco’s investigation…

After Dr. Hatfill came under suspicion in the anthrax case in 2002, an F.B.I. surveillance team began following him everywhere, and a small motorcade sometimes trailed his car around Washington.

In May 2003, an F.B.I. surveillance car ran over Dr. Hatfill’s foot in Georgetown as he approached the car to take the driver’s picture. He was given a ticket for “walking to create a hazard” and was fined $5.

Also (in the “it is to laugh” department)…

An F.B.I. spokesman, Jason Pack, said the anthrax investigation “is one of the largest and most complex investigations ever conducted by law enforcement” and is currently being pursued by more than 20 agents of the F.B.I. and the Postal Inspection Service.

“Solving this case is a top priority for the F.B.I. and for the family members of the victims who were killed,” Mr. Pack said.

But Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat whose district was the site of a postal box believed to have been used in the attacks, said he would press Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., for more answers about the status of the case.

“As today’s settlement announcement confirms, this case was botched from the very beginning,” Mr. Holt said. “The F.B.I. did a poor job of collecting evidence, and then inappropriately focused on one individual as a suspect for too long, developing an erroneous theory of the case that has led to this very expensive dead end.”

Of course, no one could have predicted this (and thanks for sticking us with the tab for your incompetence, Mueller and Asscroft).

Update 8/1/08: Here and here; to say all of this is curiouser and curiouser is an understatement (with this story stirring things up once more).