Two senate buildings reopen, one stays shut
As lawmakers take a Thanksgiving holiday week break, two of the three Senate office buildings in Washington are set to reopen after being swept for anthrax contamination. The third will remain closed.
Lieutenant Dan Nichols of the Capitol Police said the Dirksen and Russell buildings would reopen later today.
The Hart building, which was closed last month after an anthrax-tainted letter was found in the office of Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, remained closed.
The Dirksen and Russell buildings were closed on Saturday after a letter to Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, similar to the one sent to Daschle, was discovered in one of the 280 barrels of mail quarantined after the contaminated Daschle letter was opened.
Nichols said last night that the letter to Leahy was being analysed at the Army’s Fort Detrick in Maryland. Test results were not expected for several days, he said.
It was unclear whether the letter to Leahy ever reached his office, said the senator’s chief of staff, Luke Albee.
The envelopes addressed to Daschle and Leahy were similar, except for the name and address both were addressed in block printing with a slight slant to the right, both had October 9 postmarks from Trenton, New Jersey, and both carried the same, nonexistent school as the return address.
The FBI said all congressional mail set aside after discovery of the Daschle letter had been inspected, and the Leahy letter was the only suspicious piece.
No Senate or House member or aide has contracted anthrax, and congressional business largely returned to normal before this week’s Thanksgiving recess.
National Guard troops, however, were deployed over the weekend to help relieve overburdened Capitol Police officers.
Four people have died from anthrax: two Washington postal workers, a hospital employee in New York City and a newspaper picture editor in Florida.
