Blessed by Walnut Creek and Trinity Center - my taxes paid for my losses

Read More

Former F.B.I. Agent Sues, Claiming Retaliation Over Misgivings in Anthrax Case

 

By SCOTT SHANEAPRIL 8, 2015
  WASHINGTON — When Bruce E. Ivins, an Army microbiologist, took a fatal overdose of Tylenol in 2008, the government declared that he had been responsible for the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, which killed five people and set off a nationwide panic, and closed the case.
Now, a former senior F.B.I. agent who ran the anthrax investigation for four years says that the bureau gathered “a staggering amount of exculpatory evidence” regarding Dr. Ivins that remains secret. The former agent, Richard L. Lambert, who spent 24 years at the F.B.I., says he believes it is possible that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax mailer, but he does not think prosecutors could have convicted him had he lived to face criminal charges.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Tennessee last Thursday, Mr. Lambert accused the bureau of trying “to railroad the prosecution of Ivins” and, after his suicide, creating “an elaborate perception management campaign” to bolster its claim that he was guilty. Mr. Lambert’s lawsuit accuses the bureau and the Justice Department of forcing his dismissal from a job as senior counterintelligence officer at the Energy Department’s lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in retaliation for his dissent on the anthrax case.
The anthrax letters were mailed to United States senators and news organizations in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, causing a huge and costly disruption in the postal system and the federal government. Members of Congress and Supreme Court justices were forced from their offices while technicians in biohazard suits cleaned up the lethal anthrax powder. Decontamination costs nationwide exceeded $1 billion. At least 17 people were sickened, in addition to the five who died.
Continue reading the main story
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
The bureau’s investigation, one of the longest-running and most technically complex inquiries in its history, has long been seen as troubled. Investigators initially lacked the forensic skills to analyze bioterrorist attacks. For several years, agents focused on a former Army scientist and physician, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, who was subsequently cleared and given a $4.6 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit. Reviews by the National Academy of Sciences and the Government Accountability Office faulted aspects of the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the case.
Photo

The late Bruce Ivins in 2003, when he was a microbiologist at Fort Detrick, Md.CreditSam Yu/Frederick News Post, via Assocaited Press
Mr. Lambert, who was himself criticized for pursuing Dr. Hatfill for so long, has now offered, in his lawsuit and in an interview, an insider’s view of what hampered the investigation.
“This case was hailed at the time as the most important case in the history of the F.B.I.,” Mr. Lambert said. “But it was difficult for me to get experienced investigators assigned to it.”
He said that the effort was understaffed and plagued by turnover, and that 12 of 20 agents assigned to the case had no prior investigative experience. Senior bureau microbiologists were not made available, and two Ph.D. microbiologists who were put on the case were then removed for an 18-month Arabic language program in Israel. Fear of leaks led top officials to order the extreme compartmentalization of information, with investigators often unable to compare notes and share findings with colleagues, he said.
Mr. Lambert said he outlined the problems in a formal complaint in 2006 to the F.B.I.’s deputy director. Some of his accusations were later included in a report on the anthrax case by the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” infuriating bureau leaders.
The F.B.I., which rarely comments on pending litigation, did not respond to requests for comment on Mr. Lambert’s claims.
Although the lethal letters contained notes expressing jihadist views, investigators came to believe the mailer was an insider in the government’s biodefense labs. They eventually matched the anthrax powder to a flask in Dr. Ivins’s lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland and began intense scrutiny of his life and work.
Photo

The police in Frederick, Md., spoke with a woman they identified as Diane Ivins, the wife of Bruce E. Ivins, 62, at the couple's home in Frederick, Md., in 2008. CreditRob Carr/Associated Press
They discovered electronic records that showed he had spent an unusual amount of time at night in his high-security lab in the periods before the two mailings of the anthrax letters. They found that he had a pattern of sending letters and packages from remote locations under assumed names. They uncovered emails in which he described serious mental problems.
The investigators documented Dr. Ivins’s obsession with a national sorority that had an office near the Princeton, N.J., mailbox where the letters were mailed. They detected what they believed to be coded messages directed at colleagues, hidden in the notes in the letters.
As prosecutors prepared to charge him with the five murders in July 2008, Dr. Ivins, 62, took his own life at home in Frederick, Md. Days later, at a news conference, Jeffrey A. Taylor, then the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, said the authorities believed “that based on the evidence we had collected, we could prove his guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”

California Today

The news and stories that matter to Californians (and anyone else interested in the state), delivered weekday mornings.
Sign Up
Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.

• SEE SAMPLE
• PRIVACY POLICY

But Mr. Lambert says the bureau also gathered a large amount of evidence pointing away from Dr. Ivins’s guilt that was never shared with the public or the news media. Had the case come to trial, he said, “I absolutely do not think they could have proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” He declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry.
After retiring from the F.B.I. in 2012, Mr. Lambert joined the Energy Department. But an F.B.I. ethics lawyer ruled that because Mr. Lambert had to work with F.B.I. agents in his new job, he was violating a conflict-of-interest law that forbade former federal employees from contacting previous colleagues for a year after they had left their government jobs.
That ruling led to his dismissal, Mr. Lambert said, and he has not been able to find work despite applying for more than 70 jobs. His lawsuit asserts that several other former F.B.I. agents were able to take identical intelligence jobs with the Energy Department and that he was singled out for mistreatment.

Read More

The Yahoo Hacking Case Mary B. McCord / Acting Assistant Attorney General

MEET THE ACTING ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL

Mary B. McCord is the Acting Assistant Attorney General and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice.  Ms. McCord oversees nearly 400 employees responsible for protecting the country against international and domestic terrorism, espionage, cyber, and other national security threats.  She also works closely with the nation’s 93 United States Attorney’s Offices in the investigation and prosecution of national security matters in their districts.

Ms. McCord joined the National Security Division in 2014 from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, where she served for nearly 20 years, most recently as the Criminal Division Chief. In that capacity, she supervised the prosecution of all criminal matters in federal district court. Ms. McCord also served for more than five years as a Deputy Chief in the Appellate Division, where she supervised and argued hundreds of cases in the U.S. and District of Columbia Courts of Appeals. Ms. McCord graduated from Georgetown University Law School, and clerked for Judge Thomas Hogan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Read More

USDOJ: PG&E Indictment Obstruction Of The Investigation

PG&E Charged With Obstruction Of The Investigation Of The National Transportation Safety Board And Additional Violations Of The Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 29, 2014

SAN FRANCISCO - A federal grand jury for the Northern District of California returned a superseding indictment charging Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) with obstruction of the investigation of the National Transportation Safety Board ("NTSB"), as well as additional violations of the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act of 1968 (PSA), announced U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag, California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris, San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen M. Wagstaffe, U.S. Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General Special Agent in Charge William Swallow, and FBI Special Agent in Charge David J. Johnson.




The superseding indictment alleges that PG&E obstructed the NTSB's investigation that began immediately after the deadly San Bruno explosion. According to the superseding indictment, during the course of the NTSB's investigation, PG&E provided a version of a policy outlining the way in which PG&E addressed manufacturing threats on its pipelines. PG&E later withdrew that policy claiming it was produced in error, and was an unapproved draft. In fact, PG&E was operating under the so-called unapproved draft from 2009 through April 5, 2011. The consequence of this practice was that PG&E did not prioritize as high-risk, and properly assess, many of its oldest natural gas pipelines, which ran through urban and residential areas.

Additionally, the superseding indictment charges PG&E with 27 counts of knowingly and willfully violating the PSA. These charges stem from PG&E's record keeping and pipeline "integrity management" practices. The superseding indictment alleges that PG&E failed to address recordkeeping deficiencies concerning its larger natural gas pipelines knowing that their records were inaccurate or incomplete. The superseding indictment also alleges that PG&E failed to identify threats to its larger natural gas pipelines and that PG&E did not take appropriate actions to investigate the seriousness of threats to pipelines when they were identified. Finally, the superseding indictment alleges that PG&E failed to adequately reprioritize and assess threatened pipelines after the pipelines were over pressurized as required by the PSA and its regulations.

PG&E is charged with one count of obstruction of an agency proceeding in violation of 18 U.S.C. §1505, and 27 separate counts of violations of the PSA. The maximum statutory penalty for each count is a $500,000 fine or a fine based on the twice the gross gain PG&E made as a result of the violations, or twice the losses suffered by the victims. The superseding indictment alleges that PG&E derived gross gains of $281 million, and victims suffered losses of approximately $565 million. PG&E is next scheduled to appear on August 18, 2014 before the Honorable Thelton E. Henderson, United States District Judge.




Kim A. Berger and Hallie M. Hoffman are the Assistant U.S. Attorneys who are prosecuting the case, with the assistance of Alycee Lane and Pat Mahoney, along with Deputy Attorneys General Brett Morris and Deborah Halberstadt from the California Attorney General's Office. The prosecution is the result of an investigation conducted by the San Mateo County District Attorney's Office, the United States Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General, the FBI, the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration, and the city of San Bruno Police Department.

Please note, an indictment contains only allegations and, as with all defendants, PG&E must be presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

(PG&E superseding indictment )

Read More