Former agent sues FBI for retaliating against him for criticizing anthrax letters investigation

“This case was hailed at the time as the most important case in the history of the FBI,” Lambert told the Times. “But it was difficult for me to get experienced investigators assigned to it.”

In an interview with the newspaper he said that the investigation was understaffed and that it suffered from turnover. Moreover, twelve of the twenty agents assigned to the case had no prior investigative experience. For a case depending on scientific forensics, the FBI gave the investigators little by way of scientific support: Senior agency microbiologists were unavailable, and two Ph.D. microbiologists who were put on the case were removed for a prearranged 18-month Arabic language course in Israel.

In addition, senior agency leaders were so afraid of leaks that they imposed a level of compartmentalization not seen in other demanding investigative efforts. One result was that investigators often found themselves unable to share or compare notes or findings.

Lambert told the Times that he highlighted his concerns in a formal 2006 complaint to the FBI’s deputy director.

The anthrax in the envelopes was accompanied by letters expressing jihadist sentiments, but the FBI soon concluded that these letters were meant to throw the investigators off, and that the sender was someone inside the U.S. bioterror research establishment. After concluding that Hatfill was not behind the mailings, attention was directed at Ivins, after investigators concluded that the spores in the envelopes were matched the anthrax powder in a flask in Ivins’s lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

The more investigators looked into Ivins’s life and habits, the more they became convinced he was the culprit. Ivins spent an inordinate amount of time at nights and on weekends alone in his high-security lab in the periods just before the two mailings of the anthrax letters. Moreover, he was in the habit of sending letters and packages under an assumed name from remote locations.

Some of the letters were mailed from a mailbox in Princeton, New Jersey – near the offices of a national sorority in which, for some reason, Ivins showed an unexplained interest.

In July 2008 prosecutors were ready to present their case against him in court – but Ivins, 62, committed suicide at home in Frederick, Maryland before charges could be filed.

A few days later, Jeffrey Taylor, then the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said the government believed “that based on the evidence we had collected, we could prove his guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Lambert, however, insists the FBI also gathered a large amount of exculpatory evidence pointing away from Ivins – but that this evidence was never shared with the public or the news media. He told the Times that had the case been presented in court, “I absolutely do not think they could have proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

He said he could not offer specifics because most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act.

Lambert retired from the agency in 2012 and joined the Energy Department as an intelligence specialist. An FBI ethics lawyer ruled, however, that Lambert’s work with FBI agents in his security capacity at the DOE would violate a conflict-of-interest law barring former federal employees from contacting previous colleagues for a year after they had left their government jobs.

The DOE then terminated his contract, and Lambert said he has not been able to find work even though he had applied for more than seventy jobs. His lawsuit notes that other former FBI agents were hired for identical intelligence positions at the Energy Department, without the FBI’s ethics lawyers raising any objections. Lambert told the Times that he was singled out for retribution by his former bosses at the FBI who did not appreciate his candor about the shortcomings of the Ivins investigation.