So says Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Ia.) about the FBI’s seven-year investigation of who killed five people and threatened many others by sending anthrax through the mail. The Wall Street Journal’s Gary Fields and Evan Perez report that Grassley is calling for Judiciary Committee oversight into how the FBI eventually determined that former army scientist Bruce Ivins acted alone.

One particularly unnerving question is why Ivins, who committed suicide last week, kept working in his govt. lab until October 2007. Besides the FBI being on the wrong trail for a while, why was Ivins, with documented mental health problems, working with dangerous materials? Even the Feds say that Ivins was "hiding in plain sight."-MB

The Environmental Protection Agency told Texas Gov. Rick Perry that they wouldn’t ease off on a federal requirement, mandated in last December’s energy bill, that Texas put 9 billion gallons of ethanol into the nation’s fuel supply. The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin reports that Perry had complained diverting ethanol to fuel was raising food prices and hurting farmers and ranchers.

A lot of people who don’t like each other– like oil companies and environmental groups– do agree in their dislike of ethanol. Oil folks are upset by the fed’s new ethanol binge, which may eventually cut into fossil fuel consumption. Environmentalists, meanwhile, say that the wildlife and cultivation costs of corn-based ethanol make it just as bad a polluter as oil.

But as the EPA decision shows, ethanol currently reigns supreme.-MB

With five months left in the Bush administration, Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, and Josh Bolten, the White House Chief of Staff, appear to be leaving no stone unturned in resisting a Congressional subpoena.

Last week, a federal judge ruled that the President asserting executive privilege on behalf of the duo does not make them immune from producing subpoenaed documents (in the case of Bolten) and public, oral testimony (for Miers). But now the Washington Post’s Dan Eggan reports that White House attorneys informed the D.C. circuit court that "the public interest clearly favors further consideration of the issues."

Whether a further delay benefits the public is questionable. But it would greatly benefit Bolten and Miers, who otherwise would have to give information about fired U.S. Attorneys before the House Judiciary Committee in September. The end game is presumably a delay that spans into the next administration — when these subpoenas will have expired.-MB

The Washington Post’s Jerry Markon and Josh White report on the swift sentencing of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver. A jury of six military officials at Guantanamo Bay sentenced Hamdan, found guility Tuesday of materially supporting terrorism, to 5 1/2 years in prison. But the military tribunal counted his five years and one month detention at Guantanamo as prison time, meaning Hamdan’s sentence ends in January.

And yet since this is a military tribunal and not an actual system of justice, the Bush administration (which will be in power the first 20 days of January) could order the military keep him detained him anyway. Another scenario is that Hamdan will be transferred back to his home of Yemen.

Hamdan was aware that bin Laden was a mass murderer when he was driving the Al Qaeda leader. But it also sounds like there are no Al Qaeda secrets Hamdan’s withholding. Detaining Hamdan after his sentence would seem unusually cruel.-MB