Kind of funny then that Gates and Riley had this big time pristine sterile environment set up in their apartment to examne the Declaration of Independence? When the cops were there waiting for them, they hightail it to Gates' father's house (who just happens to have a big old bowl of lemons waiting for them in the refrigator, waiting for a son he has not spoken to in ten years) and decide what the hey lets use heat and lemon juice. So it goes from being a fragile document that needs a special environment to examine it in to something that gets battered around the rest of the movie...Yeah really makes sense there...
And exactly who did Ian try to kill, and why did the FBI agent just decided to ignore all the laws that Gates broke and just bust Ian? A lawyer would have that case tossed out of court and Harvey Kietel would be working with Mudler and Scully in the X-Files if he did not get fired for incompetence.
Dan Brown's book, the Da Vinci Code, was just as bad...History Channel just ran a special totally de bunking everything in that book.