Grubstakers - Episode 196: The Anthrax Attacks feat. Robbie Martin

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

We're joined by Robbie Martin of Media Roots Radio to discuss the 2001 Anthrax attacks in the United States and explore the case of Matt Dehart, an incarcerated hackactivist who claims to have received documents linking the bio-terrorism event to elements of the CIA. It's a story so bizarre that you might not believe it but listen to our overview of the official government investigation and the shutdown of any follow up and tell us you don't have questions. You can find Robbie on twitter @FluorescentGrey You can listen to the Media Roots Radio podcast on the anthrax attacks here: https://soundcloud.com/media-roots/schrodingers-super-patriot-the-2001-anthrax-mystery-pt-1-of-2 And view his short documentary on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PqU7dXEirU

We find people that basically can't make enough to eat before they go into the fields. I don't believe that. I think that you're looking at other places that are not Central Romana. People actually who focus on and who like getting an orgasm never get one. Pull up your socks and figure out what you're going to do. Any chance I get to be a complete red state? Oh, yeah. Well, the future's always uncertain. But more uncertain now.

Listen, Blue Ivy is six years old. Beyonce's dead. She tried to outbid me on a painting. Everybody in Atlanta right now at the Louis Vuitton store, if you black, don't go to Louis Vuitton today. In five, four, three, two, one. Hello and welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy and I'm joined here today by my good friends, Yogi Paywall, Steve Jeffers.

And so longtime listeners of this podcast have likely noted my slow descent into madness over the course of the coronavirus lockdowns, as I've led myself down every rabbit hole of JFK, RFK, MKUltra, Vince Foster, Promise Software, vaccine and fluoride skepticism. And we're here today to continue that. But today, we're going to talk about a quote-unquote conspiracy theory that is, in my mind, so blatant and so obvious that I think even the people who are usually skeptical of so-called conspiracy theories have to admit that 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States. And to discuss them, we're joined by a guest, Robbie Martin, who's a podcaster and documentary filmmaker who has been studying this issue for over 10 years now. He's produced a short documentary on it called American Anthrax

and a very informative podcast with Media Roots Radio called Schrodinger's Superpatriot, the 2001 anthrax Mystery, and we will link to both of those in the description for this episode. Robbie Martin, thank you for being with us today. Well, thank you for having me. And I also want to mention why this story is topical right now. There's a new documentary coming out called Enemies of the State. It tells the story of hacktivist Matt DeHart, who has claimed to have received classified documents from somebody claiming to be an FBI official,

implicating the CIA in those anthrax attacks. Matt DeHart is currently serving a seven and a half year prison sentence for possession of child pornography that may or may not be a politically motivated charge. And Robbie, you got the chance to interview Matt DeHart back in 2013. So I do want to talk about his story more generally and your impressions of him. But before we kind of go down that rabbit hole, maybe you could just back up and you could remind people who are listening and who might not know what the anthrax attacks were and in Virginia, I think is where the Pentagon is. Or is it Maryland?

I don't know the exact location of the Pentagon, that this was not just a singular incident and that it meant that more attacks would continue. And, you know, several actual Bush associates, not people in the administration, but people like Don Kagan and actually Richard Pearl, who was currently serving in the Pentagon at the time, predicted on live broadcast that the next attack would be anthrax. And in fact, it was. And on October 5th was the first official death reported from an unknown anthrax attack or like attacker that killed somebody named Robert Stevens, a photojournalist working for the National Enquirer in Florida. And after that happened, within days, it became sort of this hysterical media atmosphere, and the Bush administration and George W. Bush himself helped sort of egg it on that this could be from Al-Qaeda, that this could be a second stage of 9-11, and that it might not

just be Al-Qaeda because, you know, there was already this framework that existed during the Clinton administration that terrorists could possibly be working with, you know, ex-Soviet defectors or even Saddam Hussein to acquire biological weapons or things that were too sophisticated for a group like Al-Qaeda to obtain on their own. So then we had, it's already had this three-way connection that started forming this idea that it was Al-Qaeda, you know, bin Laden and Saddam somehow working together that may have done these anthrax attacks. Now I should also say that even on the day of 9-11, there were people like James Woolsey of Project for the New American Century already saying Iraq did 9-11. So this just added extra

ammunition to that idea that this was a continuing series of terrorist attacks somehow done by Al-Qaeda, but now they have anthrax, which means state actor potentially. So we have this snowball already rolling. And over the course of October, November, and December, four more people died from this anthrax. And an old lady, a widow, I think she was 89 years old in Connecticut, passed away from anthrax named Audley Lundgren. And there were two postal workers who worked at the Brentwood post office who also passed away from anthrax infection, inhalation anthrax infection. Now it's ultra disturbing to me about those specific two deaths of those postal employees is that one of them is actually on his 911 call the day that he died, is saying that no one, not his bosses, no managers, told him to do anything to get checked up, to take Cipro, nothing.

And this was like a month or two after 9-11, and apparently this was reported by Judicial Watch, I think sometime in 2002, that the Bush administration was actually officially told, some people think it was Jerome Hauer who told him to do this, to start taking Cipro on the evening of 9-11 with this idea that the next attack was going to be anthrax. So all those pieces were sort of in play. And so now you have five deaths. And oddly, it took the FBI about a week and a half to actually start

investigating this. It was only the CDC was in charge of it for the first week, which seems a little strange to me considering 9-11 had just happened. So once the FBI started to investigate this and there were actual FBI people on the ground at these crime scenes, there was already leaks coming out from the FBI to the press saying that this was the AIM strain, which has American fingerprints on it. Those stories got largely buried in the press, but they did get out there. There was someone in the FBI who wanted the public to know this. And at the same time, you have much more powerful leaks coming out through ABC News that got way more attention

in the media, such as Brian Ross's ABC News segment where he said that insider intelligence officials say that the anthrax that was sent through the mail has telltale signs of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program because it supposedly had bentonite in it, which it didn't, but bentonite is basically just like clay. It's nothing really even that specialized to have. So the story itself doesn't really make much sense, but it really sort of fueled this idea that Saddam was behind the attacks. And then you had the Weekly Standard and all these neocon outlets also saying that Saddam was probably behind the attacks. So this framework, this thinking is sort of what led to the idea of weapons inspections.

Even though people may not connect that in their mind, I mean, the entire UN presentation that Colin Palin ended up doing to try to sell the Iraq war was almost completely contingent on anthrax. I mean, he spent most of his time talking about anthrax. By that time, the yellow cake, the idea of nerve gas stockpiles, and even that supposed meeting behind the Ba'athist people and Muhammad Atta, those ideas mostly fell to the wayside. People had debunked those. But we did experience a real anthrax attack here, which made people incredibly afraid and made a lot of people in the country feel that maybe terrorism could hit me in my own home. I mean, that's like a whole other layer of

this sort of war on terror hysteria that I think people largely forget because they only remember 9-11. They only remember the Pentagon and the World Trade Center is getting hit. But I should also mention, I forgot to say this, that there were actual letters sent that had contained this anthrax. And two of those letters got to Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle. And what's interesting about them being targeted, even though they didn't get infected, they survived. Other people and their staff had to get tested and go to the hospital, but they ended up being fine. But what's strange about that is they were actually two of the only senators who were slowing down the passing of the Patriot Act.

And when I say slowing down, I don't mean like aggressively rallying against it. They're basically centrists. They were merely just putting a little bit of brakes on it and telling the Bush administration, hey, let's actually have some time to talk this out and then they got targeted with an anthrax letter they were supposed to be targeted actually on the same day but apparently patrick lahey's letter got delayed in the mail and didn't end up arriving until like a two weeks later or something like that fucking lazy postman tom tom Daschle was the Senate Majority Leader at the time? Yes, he was, yeah. Yeah, Democrat.

We should just underline for listeners who maybe weren't alive then or don't really remember, because, you know, I was a kid then, and I actually, doing the research for this episode has brought back a lot of memories to me. Like, first of all, just the general sense of terror in the country after 9-11 was really exacerbated both by this idea that you are going to open your mail and get killed by anthrax powder, and also, of course, the DC sniper was going around then. So there was just like this real sense of paranoia that I think I really felt as a child and that a lot of people who weren't there can't really understand. And I did also, I had another memory that I just wanted to bring up in terms of linking this to Saddam. I do remember, you know,

I would, uh, I had this shitty little, uh, 56 K, uh, com, uh,

what is it called? Compu serve. Yeah. Compu serve internet connection that I would play Starcraft on. And we only had one modem line so if one of my mom's friends called I would get disconnected and lose the match immediately and get extremely pissed off but what so one of these days you know like late 2001 probably like December or October 2001 I logged on to my CompuServe internet and they of course have the

default news home screen I saw on that default news home screen as a child something to the effect of a news article saying, experts link the anthrax just want to go to war with Iraq. And, you know, one of the most perceptive things my mother ever said. But it was just interesting to remember that and just to kind of remember the general attitude of living through that. Sean, didn't your mom once say don't go into stand-up comedy or podcasting? Yes. Wasn't that something she also said? The second most perceptive thing my mother ever said. Yeah, no, I mean, that's part of why i put together you know such a very very specific uh sort of surgical chronology of the first three months

of the attacks because my sort of theory behind doing that is that it'll actually like jog people's memories even people who they think back on it, they're like, yeah, I vaguely remember that. But just sort of walking people back through that time period, I think maybe like unlocks, you know, some memories people still have buried in there. And they're like, oh, yeah, that, you know, that happened. What the hell? So, that's, I found that it's been effective for doing that for people when I show them that. Yeah. And to just underline something you said there, Robbie, about the actual type of anthrax that was used in these letters, this is the Ames strain of anthrax, and there's an article in Salon in 2002, I'm quoting from it, there are probably less than 50 scientists in the U.S. with the necessary skills to do this, because when we're talking

about this Ames strain, this was later traced to a specific US government lab, I believe in Maryland. So just in terms of like the number of people who actually have access to this, it's extremely small. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. Because once they knew it was the aim strain, they knew it had to be somebody with access to the aim strain. And that's, you know, you can really narrow it down rather quickly from there. And that's the interesting thing about this is people inside the FBI knew that it was the classic, you know, inside job type of crime from very early on, yet they chose to allow the Bush administration. And, you know, you can really point the blame on Mueller because he was in

charge of the investigation at the time for allowing the Bush administration to basically use that as their Hail Mary, you know, for the Iraq war. Like if anybody from the FBI said anything in public about that, I mean, in my mind, it might have actually, well, maybe this is too optimistic, but it could have, you know, maybe on the stopped the iraq war from building up as fast as it did i don't know but uh it's to me that they they have there's a lot of blame there so whoever that whistleblower was that leaked that it was the aim strain i mean that person's you know kind of good in my book for for an fbi agent was it another another reason they were particularly concerned about this strain? Was it had been refined down to where each of the particles was a lot smaller than your typical and clumsily produced anthrax strain, which wouldn't be able to get through a lot of filtration systems and whatnot, but this one would. So it had the hallmarks of like a bioweapon rather

than just being like something hastily done absolutely yeah um that that's one thing uh that that's why so many people in the capitol building um so many staffers had to go to the hospital and uh get treated even though they were mostly fine they didn't have symptoms they technically got infected they breathe a little bit of it in through the ventilation systems. I mean, so that speaks to a highly refined type of powder that, you know, people who actually open these envelopes, some of them described it being almost like smoke. Like when you open, you know, you open up this envelope full of powder, even though it wasn't very very much it would actually start to float in the air immediately like um in the same way like powdered sugar or magician smoke that you like rub on your fingers would just start to you know create a little cloud in the air um yeah i think i think when people picture the anthrax attack actually happening they're kind of just

saying like all right so whoever opens the letter is probably screwed but no one else but actually that it gets into this was like so highly refined like you're saying that it was like it can very easily affect like 20 or more people in a building if you're not careful absolutely i mean they did full hazmat like quarantines on uh on the capitol building um i think even on the supreme Court building, because I guess a letter, I don't remember if a letter got through there, it went through the mail sorter there or something. And they actually, it was like the first time that they had to move the Supreme Court somewhere else. So these buildings were fully locked down. I mean, even the AMI building where Robert Stevens worked, got fully quarantined. And that's another strange aspect

to this case is some of the people who died from it actually themselves never interacted with any strange or suspicious letters. Specifically, the widow in Connecticut, Audalee Lundgren, there's no evidence that she ever got a letter. And I'm trying to remember the name of the... I... Her name escapes me. The second to last victim who also died never got a letter. And I'm trying to remember the name of the, her name escapes me, the second to last victim who also died, never got a letter. And the first victim, I mean, there's some eyewitnesses who say he got a letter, but the story, that story of his letter is very different from the rest of them. And also, the guy who was eventually accused of doing this, I don't want to jump ahead too much, but his lawyer will, you know, still says, he's not being paid by his family anymore,

but he'll still swear that the refinement levels of the anthrax found in the different letters actually speak to people with different resources, that it wasn't just that it was all the same level of refinement in each letter, like they weren't all the same power of sort of weaponized anthrax strains. Some of them were sort of crudely done as well. And that's one of his reasons for saying that Bruce Ivins, the suspect they landed on, is actually innocent because he couldn't have done all these different styles of preparation of anthrax that were found. Right. And again, to just kind of underline this, because I think people who say, oh, you're a conspiracy theorist or, oh, we solved this one, I think they have this idea in their head that anybody can get anthrax or it's like making rice and poison or something.

But no, we know that the AIM strain had to come from a U.S. government lab. And despite this initially, and, you know, Robbie goes through this in a lot of detail on the timeline of the podcast I mentioned earlier, Schrodinger's Super Patriot. But just despite this, you know, there is a very public and very long campaign to tie this to Iraq and to tie this to al-Qaeda and all this, despite, of course, the strain coming from a U.S. government lab. But eventually, because it came from a U.S. government lab, they do have to tie it to U.S. government scientists. And they accuse two. First, they accuse a guy named Stephen Hatfill, who would eventually, the Justice Department would clear his name and pay him a settlement, I believe $5 million. And then later,

they accuse another scientist named Bruce Ivins, who is hounded by a very public investigation and then in 2008 commits suicide. And to this day, the U.S. government insists that Bruce Ivins was the man who carried out these attacks. is that there is literally no physical evidence whatsoever or no non-circumstantial evidence whatsoever that actually ties either of these two accused scientists to the attacks. That's correct, yeah. With Bruce Ivins, the FBI tried to use what they claimed was DNA evidence. That was their only evidence that was other than circumstantial that supposedly linked him to the attacks. But what's funny about that is they actually hired a government agency called the National Academy of Sciences to verify their DNA evidence. And before the National Academy of Sciences actually finished their own analysis, the FBI was like, okay, we're fine. We're just going to go forward with the investigation

results and we're going to do a press conference. We don't need your confirmation anymore. And the NAS was like, well, you guys already, we already have the funding. We're already doing it. So when our thing's done, we'll just let you know. But okay. So the FBI went forward, pretended like they never hired the NAS. And months later, I think something like eight months after the FBI came forward with their claim that Bruce Ivins did it, we had the DNA proof. It's in the form of a flask that has anthrax spores in it. And the NAS, eight months after this press conference or so, said that actually we could not verify the FBI's DNA analysis.

And in fact, this is not evidence at all that this links him to the crime. So the government's own agency, National Academy of Sciences, basically rebuked the FBI's DNA findings. So ultimately, no, there was no physical evidence of any kind. It's all circumstantial. Right. And I really recommend also the Frontline documentary, the Anthrax Files, kind of goes through this. But when we talk about the government investigating these two scientists, this is a very kind of brutal and public investigation where apparently before they raided the first guy, Stephen Hatfield's house, before they raided his house, they called the

media and tipped them off. So they all knew to be there and knew to see the FBI ransacking this guy's house. And Bruce Ivins, they were following 24 hours a day. Apparently, they real harassment campaign against these two and they're the only real evidence they produce is that bruce ivan's kind of seems like he might have been a bit of a weird guy like i guess he had women's panties in his basement and some obsession with some sorority but nothing that actually though sean come on now who doesn't have pretty normal stuff with the sorority where a woman wouldn't have sex with you back in the day come on that's right that's that's lambda lambda lambda material right there right you know the frontline doc did make me come across with like a this is very nerds against jocks type of mentality with the scientists being like uh they are just targeting us because they don't know what's going on and the mueller the fbi team just being, we need to nail somebody to the wall on this because we're getting our asses handed to us. Yeah. I mean, pretty much. I mean, definitely

convenient scapegoats. But what's interesting is this idea that it's just one person. I'd say even I tend to do this when I'm looking at this. I'm like, oh, well, who is it? Well, what if it's not just one person? What if it's actually a team of people who did this or you know a group of people and that's actually what patrick leahy and tom daschle have both said publicly like and it's interesting to watch them actually be asked about this because they don't want to talk about it they're like really bothered by it especially daschle the last time someone brought it up to him, I think it was at like a book, like speaking event or something. And he was really flustered. He and Patrick Leahy both have said openly that they don't think that Ivan's being the suspect makes sense. And Leahy has said that he thinks there are still people

out there who are guilty of murder who have not been taken in for this. So he's basically saying he thinks it's a team of individuals. Yeah, like from that documentary you made, one of the things you highlight is apparently, so one of the anthrax letters was sent to Tom Brokaw at NBC News. Apparently on this letter, a handwriting expert looked at it, and the letter R, like every word that has the letter R in it, apparently the way the R's are written changes between the ones written inside the letter and the ones written on the envelope, which possibly indicates two different authors. But I did also just want to highlight that the content of one of the letters is just, I posted it on Twitter. It's just so absurd to me.

But one of the letters, one of the anthrax letters that was sent has the date 9-11-01 at the top. And it says, and I'm quoting what they actually wrote in this anthrax letter here, quote, You cannot stop us. We have this anthrax. You now are you afraid death to america death to israel allah is great unquote and it's just like i don't know this you you you read that and you're like yeah oh yeah for sure this is definitely uh what an islamic terrorist organization would do and not my fucking fourth grade novel about uh you know an islamic jihad cell i mean it's just so ridiculous i don't know sean i hear that and i i clearly see that's a scientist that wrote that right but it's like yeah it's why would a lone nut attacker but you know well that's where the that's where the uh the term super patriot comes from is

one of the fbi's theories uh i don't even know if they did a like you know when they do a profile of the stuff they probably did some like loose profiling of him early on you know before they went ahead and targeted bruce ivans but i think it actually was in the fbi report that someone says that he must have been a super patriot that was so inspired by the bush administration's war on terror that he wanted to just you know basically like a super patriot accelerationist neocon who happened to work at fort detrick maryland with access to anthrax right uh the dna evidence that narrowed it down to like okay there's 50 people who have access to labs capable of producing the strain or whatever uh it could be like you it could be any

number of those 50 and it could also be uh their relationships outside of the 50 in order to get it to sent to tom dashnell or whoever and also one other angle to look at here too is like, that's what we know that, that's what's public knowledge in terms of how many scientists might have access to this with these government labs. There's a whole other angle to this that Matt DeHart and his claims that sort of came out

that this could have actually come from a private, some sort of privatized lab that deals in bioweapons. Now, when you throw that into the mix and how much of the war on terror, sort of this gray area of intelligence sectors and military sectors mixing with private industry, you have to look at a company like Battelle, which did at times produce weaponized anthrax, apparently, and got all these CIA contracts. I mean, they're one of the top, you know, military intelligence contractors. So there's all these different possibilities here, I think. So the Fort Detrick angle, it might have come from there. But I think that a lot of the

evidence that's come out has shown that it really could have come from anywhere. And that's part of what the NAS, the National Academy of Sciences said when they rebuked the fbi's dna findings they said that the type of anthrax it was used could mutate on its own and actually like make it untraceable in terms of like this dna fingerprint of where it may have come from anyways um yeah you're right so yeah i think they i was i was reading something about like the said it would certainly be expensive to set up a private lab capable of doing Dietrich-level anthrax strains, but it's not insurmountable. You'd need to get a scanning electron microscope and a bunch of other expensive stuff that would total like maybe two million yeah yeah i have to actually i don't remember them talking about the private labbing i'd have to look into that again right but it's so interesting to me that the first letter was sent a week after the 9-11 attacks i mean it seems like somebody clearly had this ready to go

it just doesn't seem like the type of thing you can just throw together overnight. And again, the deaths are five deaths, two USPS workers, a 95-year-old widow in Connecticut, a photojournalist in Florida, and a New York City hospital worker died. And as Robbie mentioned, not all of these deaths can be actually linked to an anthrax letter. So it's all very suspicious. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that it's all very suspicious. are responsible for causing these random people across the country to die. I just don't, there's really no evidence to suggest that's the case. So that also needs to be, I think, examined more. That's the thing that's kind of wild. Like I was thinking about, because every time we've seen like in the Frontline doc and other

things, the amount of anthrax that were in the letters, like I know's uh not the real amount but like it seems like it's like you know like a quarter of a cup or something and i've always wondered like if i were you know not to play evil supervillain or not nothing but like if i were to do this now i'd put it like on the taping of a package so when you like took off the tape you would release anthrax in the air but i don't think that's really realistic like what what was the amount of powder that was in these letters because it seems so far-fetched yogi you just gave them a probable cause warren that's that's a great question and i wish i knew the answer to that but if we go by what colin powell said less than a teaspoon apparently of anthrax was used in each letter

that's what he's actually it's an actual quote from him during the un speech and he's holding a vial of like mock anthrax it looks like it's about i don't know maybe an ounce or something right um and uh i yeah the thing i wanted to say to your point sean is this idea of you know that this was sent only a week after 9 11 it seemed like there was someone, whoever did this maybe even had some foreknowledge, perhaps. I think that might be what you're suggesting. So, taking that into account, that's a good time to mention the fact that let's say whoever did 9-11 was also trying to link the anthrax attacks to the same perpetrators

of 9-11 and it was going to be presented more as a double whammy terrorist attack by al-qaeda there are some strange things that you know don't really make sense according to the fbi's official story like muhammad atta for example trying to rent a crop duster and specifically apparently trying to rent it for the purposes of spreading biological weapons. There was actually another hijacker who was treated in the hospital by a doctor who believed that he had cutaneous anthrax infection leading up to 9-11. These things just, to me, they're not puzzle pieces that fit into what we already know. They just make this puzzle much larger and almost more confusing because how could that be if Bruce Ivins was responsible for this? And the FBI and the

government never said that the hijackers had anything to do with the anthrax, but the media surrounding these things at the time really was suggesting that to be the case. And real witnesses, there were people who were real people who, you know, the doctor who treated one of these hijackers, the guy at the airfield who saw Muhammad Atta trying to steal a crop duster off the runway. I mean, just bizarre behavior. So, to me, it just makes it a lot more confusing. Yeah. And to just talk about the letters themselves i believe officially there are four actual anthrax letters sent but then there are also a bunch of hoax letters where like

apparently government officials in israel and japan i think somebody in australia too would receive these letters just fill a full of white powder but it's not anthrax apparently judith miller of the New York Times also got one of these hoax letters. So again, this is all just, I mean, it really did create a climate of sheer terror at the time. Right. Yeah, what's fascinating about her,

I mean, I'm glad you brought her up, and I don't want to sound too tinfoil to people out there, but she's a really interesting person in all this too because her anthrax hoax letter, I think only arrived like five days after Robert Stevens died. It was – the timing of it seems strange because like whoever sent this fake anthrax letter to her, did they also know the real anthrax attacks were coming? How does that make sense and then strangely she released a book all about saddam hussein's biological weapons program two days before robert stevens died from anthrax and there's a really creepy quote uh that scooter libby was sending her a coded message i believe when he was in jail

and she was communicating to him in jail and he said something about when the aspens turn their roots connect and your job is to talk iraq and biological weapon like he this is literally like a message he sends her from prison and it's just like well what was she was she just a bush administration proxy like was she a journalist like what's the deal with judith miller i don't know. But her whole deal is really, really weird. Right. And yeah, Judith Miller, the New York Times is one of the journalists kind of most responsible for selling the WMDs in Iraq lie. And I think you also noted, Robbie, in your podcast that apparently pre 9-11, she took part in some sort of biological weapons attack simulator training. Is that correct?

You're referring to Operation Dark Winter. Yeah, that is actually spawned a video game and like a Discovery Channel special at this point. But yeah, it was not just for a simulated anthrax attack, which also did happen in this simulation drill. It took place in June of 2000, or no, so June of 2001, just a few months before 9-11. And it was Judith Miller, James Woolsey, Jerome Hauer, and a few other journalists and people pretending to be different people, like James Woolsey

pretended to be the FEMA director during this drill. And the drill was essentially a simulated pandemic caused by some terrorist group. And the pandemic was a smallpox release by Al Qaeda. They don't say who the group is in the simulation, but the idea is a terrorist releases a bioweapon. And then at the end of this so-called dark winter, when all the hospital beds are taken up, it's eerily in a weird way sort of similar to a lot of the predictions before COVID really hit. And that's kind of unsett fake news broadcasts, actually, you can watch on YouTube right now, if you look for Operation Dark Winter, where they have actors pretending to be reporters. You know, they do this during these various drills. You can watch them going back the last 10 or 20 years's basically like in the simulation there's like civil war breaking out all the hospital beds are flooded people are dying from smallpox all over the country the electricity's off it's like that's what's happening while this news reporter's

talking and then she reports at the end that the fbi has said that a a letter was sent uh to the government or to the white House saying that next comes anthrax. And they believe that the letter came from someone, a terrorist group that was working for bin Laden, somehow hired by Saddam Hussein. Like, I'm not kidding. Like, they actually say this in the end of the simulation. And it's just, at that point, it's like, I mean, come on. Like, it's almost like, and it's hard to talk about without sounding like Alex Jones-y tinfoil level, but I mean, it's real.

I mean, it's a real simulation. I'm not saying that they, you know, these people were involved in the anthrax attacks, but it's just a strange coincidence, to say the least. Right. And, you know, just to kind of underline that again, you know, so Marcy wheeler is a journalist she put together a timeline of this at shadowproof.com we can link to but just to kind of underline i think a lot of people listening they do understand that you know the media in the u.s and abroad kind of it sold bullshit on the wmds in iraq and the way

it did that was you know quoting, quoting unnamed high up officials, just taking them at their word, printing their claims fully credulously. But I think what has been kind of totally forgotten is, as this timeline lays out, the exact same thing happened with the anthrax attacks. Just throughout all of 2001, or throughout late 2001, all these major reports, like you mentioned, ABC news did a big report in october 28 2001 uh citing this link to saddam hussein apparently john mccain went on the late show with david letterman october 18 2001 and said quote some of this anthrax may have come from iraq unquote and so just kind of like and you know of course the new york times judy miller and all this and so just all of this uh kind of build up it does have an effect and then it's never really

walked back walked back or corrected later or if it is the correction nobody sees it so yeah i mean that's that's part of the problem with this whole case is it's not just been none of you know barely any fact checking or corrections were done it's been like memory hold and this strange way that i can't really explain i mean i've never really seen anything like it because i mean when you really look back at all these events it it was one of it's basically the magic key that allowed them to create the situation necessary for the iraq war like i don't, I mean, maybe I'm giving the American people too much credit, but I do think that on some level,

if they did not have that hysteria running in the background, it would have been much harder for them to create the climate that they needed to push the Iraq war through. Right. And before we move on to the case of Matt DeHart, I do want to point out one more thing. And I think this is very important to understand, which is, you know, of course, we mentioned Bruce Ivins commits suicide in 2008. The government to this day maintains that he is the lone nut who carried out the anthrax attacks. But I think as we've established, and as I do encourage you, the listener, to look up for yourself, there is absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever, no traces of anthrax linked to the attacks linked to him, you know, nothing.

So you would think that just to kind of put this all to bed, the government would want to just do one more investigation, just kind of, you know, get this out there. Like, let's not let the conspiracy loons take over the airwaves. Let's do a public investigation but there was a claim in your documentary robbie that i you know my eyes bulged out of my skull when i saw it and i had to look it up and confirm for myself that um shortly after taking office uh president obama passes an executive order halting future investigations into the anthrax case and threatens to veto a congressional proposal to reopen the case and i actually did look at this there's this is from 2010 there was a budget for the u.s intelligence agency submitted or proposed to be submitted to the white house in 2010 and then from a bloomberg write-up of this quote president

barack obama probably would veto legislation authorizing the next budget for u.s intelligence agencies if it calls for a new investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks an administration official said a proposed probe by the intelligence agency's inspector general would quote would undermine public confidence in an FBI probe of the attacks and quote unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions unquote uh this is all said by Peter Orzog at the time Obama's director of the office of management and budget he wrote it in a letter to leaders of the house and senate intelligence committees. So Obama, through his director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2010, threatened to veto the U.S. intelligence agency's

budget for the year if they didn't take out language proposing a new probe into the anthrax attacks. And that's just so ridiculous to me that for some reason this is such a sticking point that they just can't reopen uh reopen this can of worms and i think i would really challenge anybody who who thinks we have the full story here to just explain why it was so important to get this language saying let's just let the inspector general do one more investigation out of the uh intelligence agency's budget yeah it's fucked up i mean it's it's it's really unfortunate that i just you know there's just no public pressure for it is the problem i mean i don't even know if russ holt or any of these other people who used to talk about it bringing up i

know for sure that patrick lahey or tom dashiell um they don't like to talk about it at all and uh you know i who knows why that is? You know, maybe the FBI is sort of feeding them information, claiming that, you know, there's a reason to not talk about it. I have no idea. But it's a real shame. And, you know, even just journalists, I feel, have failed on this. I mean, there's so many threads that are still out there that I blame, you know, just culture in D.C. for this as well. I mean, just like these journalists, why isn't anybody looking into this?

I mean, it's very odd to me. And I don't know if some of them have and prominent people than me who largely agree with my conclusions and my research, but they don't want to talk about some of these things. So to me, that's that sucks. And I just don't I don't feel very hopeful that we're really ever going to see a reopening or anything. I mean, maybe some maybe another journalist or other journalists who have a budget could do something, but, you know, it's going to take real, like, legwork and basically a full-fledged new investigation of it. Oh, absolutely. And I think that's a good transition point to talk about Matt DeHart, who, again, we mentioned at the top, is the subject of an upcoming documentary,

Enemies of the State, which, unfortunately, we were not able to get access to. But from various reviews I've read, apparently the movie takes kind of an agnostic point of view as to whether or not Matt DeHart is telling the truth. But, Robbie, I know you interviewed Matt DeHart back in 2013, so maybe you could just kind of tell our listeners the basics of his story telling the truth. But Robbie, I know you interviewed Matt DeHart back in 2013. So maybe you could just kind of tell our listeners the basics of his story and also just what your

impressions of him are. So I first heard of him, someone from his family contacted me because they had heard that I was, you know, had released some research on the anthrax attacks. And, um, so I, you know, I didn't really know much about his case. I didn't know much about his background working for, um, U S military, uh, doing stuff with drones. Um, and, you know, to be honest, I still don't know a whole lot about that background of his, I know more about his case. I can talk a little bit about that. But I was mostly interested in, you know, the idea that this guy could have actually gotten a hold of real leaked documents that were given to him by supposedly an FBI whistleblower who's still anonymous, basically compiling multiple, like at first i actually just thought it

was one document and i so on the phone when i was talking to him i'm asking him in my mind thinking that he just got a hold of one document maybe leading to some weird conclusion that totally contradicts the fbi's investigation i had no idea what it was he actually had. It turns out that this FBI whistleblower had compiled like a stack of documents, basically concluding that his sure based on the documents if this meant that the guy meant a rogue part of the cia a rogue cia agent he was just uh his sort of framing was that it was sort of an institutional thing and he didn't really talk much about the cover-up but the key things that came out in my discussion with matt to heart, was that apparently in that paperwork was a document showing that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, another government agency, also got involved in the anthrax attacks. And this was new information to me because there's nothing about this in the FBI's report whatsoever.

And what this document apparently showed is a Nuclear regulatory commission was hired to trace radiation. And apparently, in these documents, it shows that some of the anthrax spores had been radiated or irradiated, however you say it, with cobalt radiation, which is a method used in high-level labs to render dead or mostly dead a colony of anthrax spores, for example, or other similar things like anthrax. So, this document was showing somehow that it didn't come from Fort Detrick. And that was my conclusion from what I discussed with him. He didn't know the details of like the anthrax investigation. So, as I was discussing discussing this with him i was sort of feeding him some of the details and it was so the conversation was a little difficult because it was you know he's he only had limited time um but you know i guess the craziest thing that came

out in that discussion was that this paperwork for some reason was actually squashed by dick cheney or not not the not the whole document that this FBI whistleblower put together, but the specific document from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had been squashed by Dick Cheney for some reason. And that was the thing that stood out to me the most is that somehow the Bush administration reached in directly. That's one of the only times that we know that they did that, reached directly into the FBI investigation and told them not to include this for some reason. So that tells me that that's worth looking into. And if this FBI whistleblower somehow got those documents to Matt DeHart, we need to get those documents somehow. And unfortunately, when he was arrested for this

child pornography charge, they took his thumb drive, which allegedly have these documents still on them. So that's all I'll say about that specifically. But I mean, my personal take was that he was telling the truth. He had no reason to lie about this. It hasn't helped his case in any way. The media attention that's come out of it has been very little. So I don't really see what motive he would have. If he was maybe, let's say in theory, if he had done a GoFundMe because he's some kind of anthrax whistleblower or something. Sure. Then maybe I would have had a different perception of it. But there was nothing, I didn't get anything like that from it.

I mean, I felt that he was totally genuine. Yeah. And so, again, like with his case, the guy Matt DeHart, it's worth backing up and just kind of mentioning he was apparently kind of an anonymous 4chan guy, kind of a, like we said, hacktivist. He and some other people set up a shell where anybody could anonymously upload documents. way he tells it is he came back to the show one day and found that somebody had uploaded these documents that were allegedly put together by an fbi official that um implicated the uh cia and the anthrax attacks and he discovered these in late 2009 and then like just i think three months later is when he's hit with these child pornography charges um and as you mentioned, of course, the government sees the documents. So, you know, we, it's just like, it's very frustrating to me. And the government, of course, won't let us see these documents. So, but what you do know is just like from this

Wikipedia in 2012, the judge hearing his case, Alita Traeger, was allowed to read classified documents about DeHart. And in their ruling, they said he thought that he, DeHart, thought that the search for child pornography was really a ruse to try to get the proof about his extracurricular national security issues. I found him very credible on that issue. And that's a quote from the judge in the case so who had seen the classified documents and so it does just kind of really bother me and it seems like a very real possibility that they were just like hey what the fuck can we get this guy on and i don't of course know if whether or not he's guilty of the the child pornography charges or whether or not he was set up there but it does seem very ridiculous that they can just

say oh hey he's guilty of child porn so we have to seize all these documents now and nobody can see them and uh he'll be in prison federal prison for seven and a half years oh yeah i mean it's you know i i try not to comment on you know whether I think he's guilty of the charges or not because it to me it almost doesn't matter because it the actual sentence he got and how it happened to him does seem like he was targeted I mean so regardless of his innocence it's it's I think it's pretty unmistakable that's you know it wasn't just he was captured up in some kind of net or larger sting. It seemed like he was deliberately, specifically targeted, which is interesting. Why would they do that?

So that raises questions. But there's also something interesting I wanted to mention. The reason why I think this is so credible is because we already know that there were FBI whistleblowers, you know, not just because of what I told you earlier, that there were leaks coming out like months after the attack saying that this is the aim strain from the FBI. We don't know who that was, but we do know Richard Lambert, one of the top people in the FBI investigation who spoke to Mueller regularly about it during the investigation, he filed a lawsuit against the FBI later and the U.S. Justice Department saying that they stove piped the evidence to make it appear that Bruce

Ivins was the only potential suspect and that he felt that the investigation was manipulated. His lawsuit, the filing's available online. You could check it out. There's an interview that he's done. Actually, one of the only interviews he's done on the Ed Opperman report. For some reason, he hasn't done any other media appearances about this. But he, you know, and there's also been other lawsuits against the Justice Department. Robert Stevens' wife sued the government eventually because their conclusions were it came from a bio, you know, one of our bioweapons labs. So her lawsuit was, well, then you're responsible for my husband's death she won a settlement from that uh steven hatfield won a six million dollar settlement after the fbi targeted him and and and he claims that

they nearly drove him to suicide at a certain point which is also noteworthy because is that what happened to bruce ivans i mean you know a lot of people you know more conspiracy people than me will will just question his suicide and be like well he was suicided well i mean we already know the fbi was literally you know intimidating other suspects so much that they've said in interviews that they contemplated suicide when they were being targeted themselves so you know this bruce ivins already did show signs of possibly being mentally unstable. And I don't know what kind of dirty shit the FBI was up to, but to me, it's possible that that's what happened in that scenario. Yeah. And it's something that, you know, I've been thinking about this last week, and it's really been bothering me because I think even

people who don't ascribe to, again, quote unquote conspiracy theories, at this point will acknowledge that police in the United States do sometimes plant drugs on subjects. They do sometimes set people up to go down. suddenly say oh we found child porn on this i think these kinds of setups absolutely do happen and i think when you just think about it for 10 10 seconds it's actually far more effective than planting drugs on somebody because the general population has a revulsion towards these kinds of child predators and you're looking at like a fucking decade in prison where you're going to get stabbed if anybody in general population gets near you. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's crazy. And there's been other instances in the past. I mean, I don't know if Scott Ritter, for example, was targeted. I don't know what exactly he did or did not do. But his whistleblowing may have attracted the attention of some people trying to set him up. But maybe he wasn't necessarily completely innocent, but the fact that he might

have been targeted kind of raises questions as well. So, you know, this may have been, this may be a common practice that we don't really know about. That Operation Avalanche you were mentioning earlier, I mean, that sounds very fascinating and worth looking into, but you know, he, I, he seems totally credible to me. And I think just, there's just no reason why he would make up something about the anthrax attacks when it's such a, it's like one of the most memory hold stories there is. And not even just like in terms of like media coverage, but just in like conspiracy world. world i mean how many conspiracy videos are even out there about the anthrax i've i've never seen any it just seems like a subject even largely ignored by that world as well so i don't it just doesn't make sense to me why he would randomly throw something like that out there so well i

mean as a thought experiment just imagine you you are a person who watches and consumes child pornography. Would you accuse the Central Intelligence Agency of being involved in the 9-11 attacks? Is that a good idea to bring a spotlight towards the lifestyle that you are involved in in your spare time? Or would you just kind of keep your mouth shut about this sort of thing? It's a fair thought experiment yeah but also just on the the operation avalanche thing like so this is i don't know all the details here but i just i i the twitter user at really bad poster uh had this tweet uh that i retweeted that i thought was so interesting. Operation Avalanche was launched by Attorney General John Ashcroft in August 2001, so a month before 9-11. It was a massive child porn sting operation that ended up falsely accusing several anti-war activists. I think they ended up arresting a hundred suspects. And of course, I believe all of them were falsely charged on the evidence some of them they got on unrelated stuff but so it's this massive child porn sting that uh does end up targeting several anti-war activists uh falsely but then three years ago apparently they released a

hollywood movie called operation avalanche which is about stanley kubrick and the cia faking the moon landings so if you were to google operation landings. So if you were to Google Operation Avalanche, or if you were to Google Operation Avalanche CIA, you're just going to get this fucking movie and not this kind of weird fake sting they set up against the anti-war movement. Hey, Robby, I had a question for you. You know, from the frontline piece, they mentioned that they collected, I believe it was 30 terabytes of content from uh bruce irvins uh i sorry is it ivins was it ivins yeah uh bruce ivins um do you know how much was collected from de hart like the size of uh the thumb drive that was taken from him

you know it's i think it's probably in my article somewhere but i can't i don't remember offhand no that's more that's more than fine i like you know when they said that the amount they got from ivans was 30 terabytes like i think people hear that they're like oh that's a size of media but like one terabyte is 500 hours worth of movies like so the fact that they collected so much from ivans i was very like what did they get now sometimes uh from what i've understood that police reports will just write the limit of the content so like if they take my five terabyte hard drive we've talked about this in the show previously and i only have 100 gigabytes worth of stuff the police will say that i have five

terabytes of x y or z so i'm just curious as to um if that played into the amount of files that the heart had on the cia situation that's a really good question yeah i mean i think that from what i understand they fit on a relatively small thumb drive for that time period okay so i don't think that they i mean you know they may have wiped other like computers at his home and things like that but from what i understand it was it was a relatively small thumb drive i don't think it was more than like 16 gigabytes but as you said i mean 16 gigabytes worth of like pdf files could be like you know a lot so but he said there were a lot of like he he made it seem like there was a lot of scanned stuff in there, like, that had redactions.

And that's, so, like, as I said, a lot of handwritten notes as well, which is interesting. So, man, I mean, I'd really like to get a hold of that. And I believe it exists. I mean, I don't think it's the holy grail to, like, take down the deep state or anything. But, I mean, it's compared to other things that's, that have been leaked and things like, I mean, it kind of seems like it's pretty big,

a pretty big deal to get ahold of that cache of documents. Yeah. It is a large puzzle piece when it comes to this nation over the last 20 years. I mean, this fueled the hysteria that, that, you know,

I mean, to a certain degree, but very realistically pulled us in the predicament the country's in right now so you know it um the fact that there aren't that many conspiracies about anthrax is very intriguing because the reason sean mentioned the operation avalanche thing before we started was i was talking about researching this episode and i kept youtube being anthrax and finding Scott Ian from the band just having fun riffs on his guitar.

And I was like, oh yeah, Scott Ian, the cool beard. I'm not the biggest fan. I haven't really listened to their music, but he used to be on the Best Week Ever, I Love the 80s, 90s series and stuff on VH1. And in my mind, I'm like, wait, is that a psyop? So that when you Google anthrax, you get this cool fucking band

instead of this poison that has maybe killed people? Yeah, if you want to just go absolutely insane, start researching how many Hollywood movies and musical projects are actually cover names for CIA black ops. But there's two other things, two last things I just want to mention real quick before we close out here. Just again, from the Wikipedia on DeHart, apparently two years after his initial arrest in Canada, the U.S. Department of Justice admitted there were classified reports on him, which confirmed he was arrested, quote, for questioning in an espionage matter, unquote.

And it was a, quote,unquote, national security investigation, but it made no mention of pornography. He has also, for what it's worth, claimed that he's been drugged and tortured throughout his prison stay in various capacities. And then just the other extremely weird detail from the actual anthrax timeline itself that I got from your podcast, Robbie, is apparently in October 2001, you quote a bioweapons expert, Francis Boyle, who says that he alerted the FBI as to the limited number of people with the capability to carry out these anthrax attacks he apparently sent the fbi a full name of scientists uh you know and

contractors with access to these uh mentioned you know government bioweapons labs soon after that in october 2001 the fbi requests that the aim strain samples at iowa state university be destroyed he says this happened after he contacted the f FBI and put together this list of all possible subjects. So I guess their cover story is that they destroyed all these AIM strain samples in order to stop another attack. But it just seems very weird that they just went and destroyed this massive cache of evidence immediately after somebody seems to kind of figure out the right track investigatively yeah and the guy who i mean francis boyle doesn't have any proof of this but he it happened right after he told an fbi agent named agent bowman about this uh about this idea that he had and and this and you know this agent took him so seriously but the next action that took place was the opposite of what he expected to which is the destruction of those samples so uh you know he's basically fingered this guy and what's all you know he also comes up in the 9-11 investigation uh whistleblower

colleen rowley uh who was trying to get access to mosawi's laptop with uh fbi agent harry sammet i believe uh they got thwarted by the same fbi agent who ran his boil fingers completely unrelated to this. You know, they got thwarted by him during the attempts to get access to Massawi's laptop in the months leading up to 9-11. So it's just a weird connection there with that guy. Yeah. Speaking of weird, actually, I did remember one more thing from your podcast, and this is, as we would call it, circumstantial evidence. And again, please correct me if I'm wrong here. The tabloid, the building of the tabloid that got the anthrax attack sent to it in Florida, was the same tabloid that earlier in 2001 had published passed out drunk pictures of Bush's daughters. Is that correct or i uh misremembering that no it's correct yeah although all right the idea that um you know there's been there was a rumor sort of in the conspiracy there were some and all in fairness there were some anthrax conspiracies earlier on like in the early

2000s and those are mostly what you'll find if you google search stuff and one of them was that robert stevens was the one who published that photo spread. Now, I've looked into that. I've actually tried to follow that to see if any of that's true. I have the actual issue sitting to the left of me right here, where I'm sitting in my studio. And there's no mention of Robert Stevens' names anywhere on that particular issue. So, if that is, it could be a random coincidence, but if there was anthrax sent there to get revenge for their negative coverage of bush's daughters it was just meant to kill anyone it wasn't uh it didn't seem like it was targeted at anyone specific but maybe it was i

mean we don't know you know because we the only we only have really circumstantial evidence from i think a 16 year old intern who worked at the AMI building that said that Robert Stevens got some kind of letter, but they never found it. There's no physical evidence for its existence. Hey, you know, one thing I was wondering was if you'd seen this Whitney Webb piece about engineering contagion, UPMC, Coronathrax, and the darkest winter, and its connection between the vaccine for corona and anthrax being produced at upmc by people like jeffrey romoff who is the ceo of upmc if you look him up on youtube you find a speech where he proclaims i am caesar so that man seems very stable but what do you

think about the connection between billion dollar pharmaceuticals and vaccines with anthrax? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I mean, there was, you know, anthrax doesn't really require a special vaccine. So, in a way, well, specifically with anthrax, I don't think there's that much money there with anthrax specifically. Now, they did try to push through an experimental anthrax vaccine of some kind as early as the Gulf War. And someone that comes up in Whitney Webb's article that's very interesting is Robert Kadlec. And he's funny because he actually appears in the Operation Dark Winter

newscasts as an act, like he's acting in it, pretending to be part of this biopandemic, bioterror pandemic. And Robert Kadlec himself was involved in something that the Bush administration was never able to actually materialize. And this sort of ties into what you asked about the vaccine industry. I mean, I don't know if this particularly was the motivation for Bush's attempt to do this, but after the Iraq war, the Bush administration was actually trying to push for a mandatory new smallpox vaccination for the American public. And this never actually happened, but Bush did a whole speech about it. He wanted this, you know, he sort of made a whole presentation around it. There was a lot of money put and doctors across the country are writing letters constantly

to newspapers saying that this is not a new version of the smallpox vaccine. It's the same one that kills a certain percentage of the population guaranteed upon injection. We're going to have thousands of people dropping dead in hospitals who get vaccinated across the country if you do this. this vaccine is not necessary but their whole logic trying to push it was that well terrorism is our new way of life here in the united states we did get hit with anthrax you know um so the next stage of this that they had been gaming out as they gamed out in the operation dark winter exercise was this idea that al-Qaeda or some other terrorist group would just unleash a like actual global pandemic, like smallpox or something that could spread

across the entire world. And just, you know, the ultimate terrorist attack was the thing they were fantasizing about. And luckily it never happened, but they really did try to do that. And I don't know how much was of the motivation was financial from these pharmaceutical industries, but I would assume that a lot of it was, you know, for how dirty the Bush administration was acting during that time period with all the no-bid contracts and all the perks they were giving to companies that were close to people in their administration. administration so i mean i would say it's pretty likely um but in terms of right now yeah i mean covid um covid is just making me i guess think about the anthrax attacks more and sure i'm hesitant to speculate on anything having to do with covid except for that as whitney webb points out in her piece robert kadlik and some of these same people these like neocon uh bioterror fear mongers were are still in there they're still in the trump administration so that's something to be concerned about i mean you know i i don't know if these people were involved in

these attacks but i they seem really sketchy to me i wanted to ask you so i sort when you're telling me when you're telling us that you think without you've you've theorized before that the anthrax attacks may have played a pivotal role in gelt like catalyzing public opinion for for to go to war and like without it you kind of wonder if if we actually would have would have been able to do it yeah like that i mean the iraq war protests were some of the largest in human history like even now yeah and i feel like i mean it's certainly plausible i was thinking i was trying to think of other events that also happened that um i think we were mostly talking before we started recording like the dc sniper

attacks like weirdly have more significance in public opinion now than than the anthrax attacks i would say i was like uh i mean that what that happened i think during the run-up too right in 2002 yeah early 2002 i believe yeah no i mean i think I mean, I think, I think, I mean, I, yeah, I think my, that thought is probably overly optimistic of me to be honest, because it's, I mean, it played a pivotal role,

but maybe, you know, maybe they didn't need it at all. Maybe nine 11 was enough. I, but I think maybe the larger point I was trying to make is that it definitely created a climate of hysteria that I think that psychological trauma of it, you know, I mean, 9-11 was very traumatizing in and of itself.

And then to have this idea that this wasn't over, that this was sort of going to continue for months, that's the anthrax attacks was pivotal for that, you know, that sort of mass hysteria, I guess you could call it. So, yeah, but I think you're right. I mean, there whether or not Bruce Ivins did it, he was one of the lead suspects. And I think that I can see that sort of stealing a lot of Americans' minds at the time and to like, it could be like your neighbor who's just like producing weaponized anthrax and it's not some outside force they're already here

and like that at the time i'm trying to recall how things it's hard to remember how feelings of fear from that long ago like in your neighborhood or whatever but like uh i do i do remember that shit kind of coming up it's like okay this is a 9-11 while terrible was an outside threat whereas this one was from the interior or like as far as they knew yeah and i think uh what sean brought up earlier i think it was sean who brought up the hoax letters that played a really big role too because most of the letters that were going around the country were hoaxes and john ashcroft oddly did a press conference saying don't send more hoax letters it's illegal don't do this stop

sending hoax letters we don't like it it's like okay are you trying to get people to send letters kind of feels like you are and i mean there was like thousands of them i mean there's like so many most of the news reports when you look up anthrax letters like if you actually look through like ap and the wire service uh search. They're mostly hoax letter reports. That's true. Well, they could have taken a reverse psychology and be like, sure, send them. I don't care.

No one cares about this. Yeah, that's known as the press conference where John Ashcroft was winking the entire time. Apparently, you also quoted Jeb Bush said something like that. He said, don't send any more hoax letters down when he was governor of Florida. Well, that's a weird thing.

I feel like that's one more, you know, without a risk of sounding too conspiratorial. You know, if you're interested in the 9-11 rabbit hole, that's a whole other angle. I feel like people ignore is like what happened in Florida is really bizarre. And the activity I told you about the hijackers trying to make crap dusters and going to the hospital for supposed anthrax infection that all happened in florida too and jeb bush was governor of florida and he apparently reached in with his uh authority and and put a stopped some of the investigations happening down there as well with the flight schools and stuff yeah we did an episode about kind of the Saudi

connection to 9-11. And a lot of that was based off of Florida. And in fact, former Florida Senator Bob Graham has said that the FBI lied to him when he was the head of an investigative congressional committee on 9-11 about the Florida connection. So yeah, there's just a lot of unexplored questions. And look, if you, the listener, if we haven't convinced you, if you think we're crazy, I think we can all agree that the easiest way to wrap this up is just let's have another investigation. Let's have a public congressional investigation or let's have the inspector general look at this. Let's have an independent, trusted authority go through and look at the evidence. And I think that's what everybody needs to demand, because the way I see it, this was absolutely murder. And personally, I think the people who did it are still out there.

But Robbie, I want to thank you, Robbie Martin, for your time today. I do want to give you just a chance to let people know where they can find you. And also, if you want, you can, of course, say if there's anything that we didn't get to, which I'm sure there's a lot, but if there's anything else that you want to mention real quick, feel free. Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to touch on the last thing you said quickly about a new investigation. I think one of the things that doesn't give me hope about that is there does seem to be a pattern happening of people who could be valuable witnesses in this case, not just simply

not saying anything, not talking to the press, sort of just staying on the sidelines. I mean, even when you bring it up to Tom Daschle or Patrick Leahy, they seem like they've just seen a ghost. They do not want to talk about it. So I think you would have to basically do a lot of foot dragging to get any key witnesses at this point. I mean, where's Bruce Ivan's family? Why aren't they saying anything? There's questions I still have about that. And that's what makes me believe that a new investigation you know would almost have to be done i think almost by journalists to start uh like who are really serious about this and maybe that could pick up some enough steam and get some of these people talking again who feel comfortable enough to you know talk to the press i mean some of them have won enormous lawsuits also and settlements

so that complicates things and they probably i'm guessing at this point you know they probably signed an agreement where it's sort of over no don't talk about this anymore you've gotten millions of dollars and um that could be the situation so but yeah i mean i i would be very open to it i mean let's let's bring it so um so yeah but but I'm not hopeful. But in terms of, yeah, if anybody wants, you know, if you've already seen American Anthrax, it's like a 40-minute documentary short that I did. It's not really a short, but not a full length. You can check that out on YouTube.

And there's another film series I put out that's a three-part documentary series about the project for the new American century. They're sort of the neocons. 17 of them went into the Bush administration. A bunch of them stayed out of the Bush administration. And there's a lot about anthrax in the movie, but it's mostly about these characters who were behind projects for the new American century. All right. Well, thank you, Robbie Martin. Again, we'll have the links to some of his work in the description for this episode. If you want to learn more about this issue, because there's a lot there. Matt DeHart is still in prison, but keep an eye out for the Enemies of the State documentary. Hopefully that at least raises some public debate and some awareness and increases these

demands for a new investigation. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Yogi Paywall. I'm Steve Jeffers. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Check us out on Patreon. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.