Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, August 8, 2008, the auspicious 80808, which is so lucky in here in our Western culture.

I'm David Plotz in Slate's Washington, D.C. office with guest Will Salatan, who, what's your title, Will?

You're like a senior editor or something?

It's even worse, a national correspondent.

You're our national correspondent.

As opposed to all of our local correspondents.

Yes, well, our real national correspondent, John Dickerson, who joins us from a national spot somewhere else in the country, is – He's our chief actually – You're still out there, right, John? Our main political correspondent. Right. Yeah, I'm still out here. Oh, good. Okay. So Emily Bazelon is on vacation. I think she's going to come back next week, and we'll get the pleasure of her comments next week. But we'll have Will this week to talk about three things. We're going to talk about the anthrax case, which broke this week and the political presidential campaign. And we'll talk about the Olympics, which are just getting underway in Beijing. And then, of course, we'll have cocktail chatter.

So, Will, fill us in a little bit on what's going on with the anthrax case.

Well, the government says they have their man, except he's dead. So they don't have to actually

conduct the trial. They just can try him in public. His name is Bruce Ivans. He's a bioterrorism researcher who had

access to the anthrax that they believe caused the deaths. And the problem is he committed suicide

as they were closing in on him, and they did not complete their investigation or prosecution.

So we'll never know for sure, but I'm pretty well persuaded that he's the

guy. Why are you pretty well persuaded? They released the FBI, as everyone who has a pulse knows,

released a ton of evidence, all the evidence that they would present presumably to a grand jury

and that prosecutors would present a trial. And as you say, his own lawyer says this is not.

This doesn't prove anything. So what was the evidence that they presented? Well, it's complicated.

First of all, he's a nut job. That's pretty well known. We know that he was writing a lot of

crazy emails. We know he was paranoid. We know he was scaring people in his therapy group. We

know that he used language in his emails that's similar to what the anthrax writer used. The really damning evidence is, remember, this is a crime committed with a weapon in which the weapon is highly exclusive. It's anthrax. It's not like you can go down to the drugstore and get anthrax, right? So they

genetically analyzed it and they ascertained that it came from a particular flask of anthrax

to which only certain researchers had access. And then from there, it is a process of elimination.

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