Probe Sought of Postal Service Anthrax Actions

A conservative watchdog group is seeking a criminal investigation into the U.S. Postal Service’s handling of last year’s anthrax contamination that killed two workers at a Washington post office.

Judicial Watch submitted documents to a federal prosecutor that it says prove postal and government officials knew anthrax spores had leaked from a letter sent to Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) into the Brentwood mail processing center but neither warned workers nor shut the site.

“The government does not have the right to injure people, to harm them, and that’s what [officials] did through their action and inaction,” Larry Klayman, Judicial Watch’s chairman, said Saturday.

Judicial Watch filed the complaint Friday with the office of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

Postal Service spokeswoman Kristin Krathwohl said the agency believed the allegations were “without merit.”

“But since this complaint has been filed with the U.S. attorney’s office, we will confer with officials there,” Krathwohl said Saturday.

Judicial Watch also said the records, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, showed the decision was made not to close the Brentwood facility after the anthrax attacks began in October 2001 because it would have cost the post office $500,000 per day.

The Judicial Watch complaint said a postal policy written in 1999 ordered the mandatory evacuation of premises whenever anthrax had been found.

Klayman’s group also filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Friday alleging that the government discriminated against Brentwood’s 2,200 workers, most of whom are black, by not immediately administering antibiotics after they were exposed to anthrax. The predominantly white staffs in the offices of Daschle and Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), where another anthrax letter was sent, were treated promptly.

Brentwood postal workers Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr. died last year from inhalation anthrax. The Brentwood facility still has not been reopened.