Everyone talks about how corrupt both James Comey and Robert Mueller are but let me remind you that they are equally terrible at their jobs.
In 2001 in the biggest case that either man had ever handled, they ended up looking like two monkeys trying to make love to a football and in the process harassed an innocent man and cost the taxpayers six million dollars after he sued the FBI.
That was the anthrax case that killed 5 people and sent some seventeen others to the hospital with serious illnesses.
Mueller and Comey targeted Steven Hatfill for the crime and when a scientist reported to the FBI that a colleague, a Fort Detrick scientist named Bruce Edwards Ivins was the actual criminal, both Comey and Mueller ignored the tip and went full guns against Hatfill. The reason they went after Hatfill is very telling in itself. Democrats.
Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy whose office, along with that of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle pressured them. Meanwhile, liberal journalist Nicholas Kristof, a conspiracy nut mocked the FBI for not arresting Hatfill as he wrote tin foil hat columns.
Mueller and Comey made Hatfill’s life a living hell.
Hatfill became “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” and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft named him “person of interest” in the investigation on national television.[1] Hatfill’s home was repeatedly raided by the FBI, his phone was tapped, and he was extensively surveilled for more than two years; he was also fired from his job at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).[2] “At a news conference in August 2002, Hatfill tearfully denied that he had anything to do with the anthrax letters and said irresponsible news media coverage based on government leaks had destroyed his reputation“.[1] Hatfill filed a lawsuit in 2003, accusing the FBI agents and Justice Department officials who led the criminal investigation of leaking information about him to the press in violation of the federal Privacy Act.[1]
The biggest question for Comey and Mueller is why they focused on someone whose scientific field did not include anthrax.
In truth, Hatfill was an implausible suspect from the outset. He was a virologist who never handled anthrax, which is a bacterium. (Ivins, by contrast, shared ownership of anthrax patents, was diagnosed as having paranoid personality disorder, and had a habit of stalking and threatening people with anonymous letters – including the woman who provided the long-ignored tip to the FBI). So what evidence did the FBI have against Hatfill?
There was none, so the agency did a Hail Mary, importing two bloodhounds from California whose handlers claimed could sniff the scent of the killer on the anthrax-tainted letters. These dogs were shown to Hatfill, who promptly petted them. When the dogs responded favorably, their handlers told the FBI that they’d “alerted” on Hatfill and that he must be the killer.
You’d think that any good FBI agent would have kicked these quacks in the fanny and found their dogs a good home. Or at least checked news accounts of criminal cases in California where these same dogs had been used against defendants who’d been convicted — and later exonerated.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times investigative reporter David Willman detailed in his authoritative book on the case, a California judge who’d tossed out a murder conviction based on these sketchy canines called the prosecution’s dog handler “as biased as any witness that this court has ever seen.”
But, it turned out that Hatfill was completely innocent and the real killer was Bruce Edwards Ivins, the man reported to Mueller and Comey by one of his co-workers over a year before. Ivins committed suicide before the FBI could arrest him after he became the main suspect.
The government had to pay Hatfill nearly six million dollars in damages.
These are the men we are supposed to believe?