Filing that lawsuit may be the worst decision of Roger Clemens’s life. It was bad enough he tried to bully and intimidate a government witness, (not to mention run him out of money in a massive lawsuit), but when he alleged governmental misconduct, that made both sides of the aisle stand up and take notice.
Congress is now demanding not only the tapes of BOTH the calls between Clemens and MacNamee and the secretly taped interviews MacNamee gave to Clemens’s and Pettitte’s private investigators, but also discovery documents. This has turned from a mild inquiry into a full-blown tribunal with the assistance of the Department of Justice. Here are some excerpts from an excellent ESPN report:
“Instead of staging a couple of hours of political theater, the U.S. House of Representatives is now pursuing a serious inquiry.
The bipartisan decisions to postpone the hearing for nearly a month and to take sworn testimony from each witness in advance are clear indications that the committee will be digging more deeply than expected into the evidence gathered for the Mitchell report and in other steroid investigations.
Clemens and the others will now face two to three hours of interrogation each from attorneys on the committee staff….In addition to the depositions of the witnesses, committee staff will be gathering other materials. When the public hearing begins on Feb. 13, the members of the committee will be armed with potentially explosive evidence, the kind of evidence that will make the McGwire-Sosa-Palmeiro hearings of March, 2005, look like a friendly bull session. No depositions were taken in advance of that session.
The Feb. 13 hearing now promises to be a serious confrontation.”
These hearings may well mark the end of Roger Clemens. Congress looks to be furious, but can you blame them? The country is in the iron grip of a debilitating drug epidemic. When teenage girls are taking dangerous, illegal unapproved drugs to stay thin, we have a problem. I haven’t see both parties of the government this unified against one man in years. He has bullied, acted surreptitiously, allegedly lied, and allegedly cheated. Yet he still has not answered the $64 million question in a credible way: Why would MacNamee trell the truth about Pettitte, but lie about Clemens?
Forget T.O. and Dallas Cowboys games, this is where you wanna break out the popcorn. We haven’t sen theatre like this since the early ’70s when another set of steroids and illegal drug hearings resulted in innocent conversation over a beer about steroid/drug gossip could just as easily lead to a seat in a witness stand.
What’s the moral of the story? Where’s the wisdom in this situation? Easy, don’t cheat…and for goodness’s sake, if you get caught don’t lie under oath.
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