So how did Mueller’s investigative team handle the case?
Mueller issued a statement in October of 2001, while anthrax victims were still dying: the FBI had found “no direct link to organized terrorism.” The John Hopkins team of experts was mistaken, the FBI continued, Al Haznawi never had an anthrax infection. The crop-dusting airplanes they needed was possibly for a separate and unrelated anthrax attack.
A few weeks later, the FBI released a remarkable profile of the attacker. FBI experts eschewed analysis of the content of the letters, where it was written in bold block letters, “Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is Great.” Instead, they focused on a “linguistic analysis,” stating that the letter’s writer was atypical in many respects and not “comfortable or practiced in writing in lower case lettering.” The FBI therefore concluded that it was likely a disgruntled American with bad personal skills.
The investigators hypothesized that the attacker was a lonely American who had wanted to kill people with anthrax for some undefined time period, but then became “mission oriented” following 9/11 and immediately prepared and mailed the deadly spores while pretending to be a Muslim.
Mueller’s FBI honed in on Steven Hatfill as the culprit — a “flag-waving” American, who had served in the Army, then dedicated himself to protecting America from bioterrorist threats by working in the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases........Hatfill successfully sued the government for its unlawful actions. He won almost $6 million dollars.