Correction:
An earlier version of this article failed to mention that a joint report by McClatchy newspapers, PBS’s “Frontline” and ProPublica first disclosed the court documents in the Florida anthrax death case. This version includes that information.
Since it began a decade ago, the federal government’s massive investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks has been plagued by missteps and complications.
Investigators initially focused on the wrong man, then had to pay him a nearly $6 million settlement. In 2008, they accused another man, Bruce E. Ivins, who killed himself before he could go to trial.
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Now, in the latest twist, the government has argued against itself.
In documents deep in the files of a recently settled Florida lawsuit, Justice Department civil attorneys contradicted their own department’s conclusion that Ivins was unquestionably the anthrax killer. The lawyers said the type of anthrax in Ivins’s lab was “radically different” from the deadly anthrax. They cited several witnesses who said Ivins was innocent, and they suggested that a private laboratory in Ohio could have been involved in the attacks.
The spectacle of one arm of the Justice Department publicly questioning another could undermine one of the most high-profile investigations in years, according to critics and independent experts who reviewed the court filings.
“I cannot think of another case in which the government has done such an egregious about-face,’’ said Paul Rothstein, a law professor at Georgetown University.
The documents were filed in a lawsuit over the October 2001 death of Robert Stevens, a Florida photo editor. His survivors accused the government of negligence for experimenting with anthrax at Fort Detrick; the case lingered in court until the Justice Department settled it in November.
The court documents in the case were first disclosed in a joint report by McClatchy newspapers, PBS’s “Frontline” and ProPublica.
The case, Stevens v. United States, offers a rare glimpse inside a typically unified and notoriously tight-lipped agency that collided with itself in a particularly controversial investigation. While the guilt of Ivins is likely to be a subject of public speculation and intrigue for years to come, the government’s inconsistency in the Stevens matter is sure to add another layer to that debate.
Justice Department prosecutors and FBI officials said they stand firmly behind their conclusions that Ivins prepared and mailed the anthrax-laced letters, which killed five people and terrified the nation just after Sept. 11, 2001. They said the civil filings were legal hypotheticals designed to shield the government from a negligence lawsuit filed by the family of an anthrax victim.
Yet last summer, when criminal investigators learned that their conclusions had apparently been challenged — and by their colleagues, no less — they were surprised and frustrated, leading to shouting matches within the department before it rushed to change portions of the filings, according to people familiar with the events.
Experts said that the civil lawyers went beyond the typical arguments attorneys make to avoid government liability, especially in a situation in which the Justice Department’s criminal side had already accused Ivins.
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