What if “wild goose chases” aren’t new to James Comey and Robert Mueller, but botching investigations and being swayed by personal views are actually old habits for the not-so-dynamic duo?
That’s the alarming conclusion that journalist Carl M. Cannon came to not long ago. While most of the media was holding up Comey and Mueller as ideal models of integrity, the executive editor of RealClearPolitics remembered very different sides of the former FBI directors.
“(The) most important factor tempering my enthusiasm for the new special prosecutor is that Comey and Mueller badly bungled the biggest case they ever handled,” Cannon explained in the Orange County Register.
He went on to outline an oft-forgotten piece of the Bush era: The anthrax case, which both Mueller and Comey were closely involved in… and quickly bungled.
“They botched the investigation of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that took five lives and infected 17 other people, shut down the U.S. Capitol and Washington’s mail system, solidified the Bush administration’s antipathy for Iraq, and eventually, when the facts finally came out, made the FBI look feckless, incompetent, and easily manipulated by outside political pressure,” Cannon wrote.
“The FBI ignored a 2002 tip from a scientific colleague of the actual anthrax killer, who turned out to be a Fort Detrick scientist named Bruce Edwards Ivins; the reason is that they had quickly obsessed on an innocent man named Steven Hatfill,” explained Cannon.
Just as politics and internal bias were major factors in exonerating Hillary Clinton and launching a witch-hunt against Trump, political pressure led the FBI down the wrong path in the anthrax case, with Mueller and Comey as the leaders of the farce.
“The bureau was bullied into focusing on the government scientist by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and was duped into focusing on Hatfill by two sources — a conspiracy-minded college professor with a political agenda who’d never met Hatfill and by Nicholas Kristof, who put her conspiracy theories in the paper while mocking the FBI for not arresting Hatfill,” Cannon wrote.
Comey’s “absolute certainty” was dead wrong. The true criminal — Bruce Ivins — ended up committing suicide before authorities could catch him. It took years and a major lawsuit for the wrongly-accused Steven Hatfill to finally clear his own name.
“The Justice Department announced Friday that it would pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Steven J. Hatfill,” stated the New York Times in 2008, some seven years after the botched investigation began.- READ MORE
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