Letters that contained suspicious white powder and were sent to then-6th Congressional District candidate Karen Handel’s Roswell neighborhood are safe, according to the FBI.
“Final Georgia Department of Public Health Laboratory results are in on all submitted letters/suspicious powder, indicating negative for any known biological threat agent,” Stephen Emmett, a spokesman for the bureau’s Atlanta field office, said Friday in a statement.
The FBI previously said the letters were not hazardous. However, they wanted to conduct additional testing to confirm the powder, sent in more than a dozen letters on June 15, did not pose any kind of threat.
Similar packages were sent to some Atlanta news stations.
The letters contained a threatening note calling Handel a “dirty fascist” and encouraging readers to take a “whiff of the powder and join her in the hospital,” according to a copy of the letter a neighbor provided to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The letters arrived one day after a gunman opened fire on members of the Republican congressional baseball team in Alexandria, Va., an attack investigators believe was politically motivated.
At the time, Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff were in the final stretch of a tense congressional race. Handel on Tuesday defeated Ossoff in the most expensive U.S. House contest in history.
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—Staff writer J.D. Capelouto contributed to this story.
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