Mail it in. The Roger the Bottle Rocket is going to do time for perjury.
In a couple of exchanges Clemens walked right into it!
Paraphrasing…
Congress: Andy is a stand up honest guy, right Roger?
Roger: Golly, he is!
Congress: Then why would he lie?
Roger: D’oh!
Congress: You discussed your wife’s HGH use with Mcnamee?
Roger: Sure did!
COngress: Earlier you said you never discussed HGH with Mcnamee at any time!
Roger: Do’h!
Congress: that butt scar is from what?
Roger: B12 shots
Congress: Ever get a reaction or bleed thru your pants from that? Mind you, others have seen it, Roger.
Roger: Nope.
Congress: MRI results and doctor testimony say scar is consistent with Winstrol V reactions.
Roger: D’oh!
They went after McNamee for inconsistent statements. He was at early stages hoping it would go away. When the noose tightened he revealed more and more. He sounded like a guy who was just trying to avoid the whole thing. But he kept syringes and bandages from Roger. He turned them over. So it may not be done. I don’t know if reaches the perjury level. It might be coming down the road.
What’s funny is how much of a meathead Roger is. He went to great lengths, perjury and maybe even tampering, to hide the fact the he was at this party, when if McNamee is lying, his mere presence at the party means nothing. If he’s lying, he’s lying about where the idea came about as well, right? Roger thinking if he can hide the fact he was at this party, that that means he didn’t inject, is pretty insanely stupid, even for him.
This is exactly right. The problem is, I don’t think RC is considering the possibility that he could get into trouble for lying. He lives on a different plane from ordinary humans…
Once you’ve lied to a congressional committee, you’re in for perjury, so Roger is in deep kimchee. But…why exactly is a congressional committee hearing testimony on this, anyway?
He doesn’t live on a different plane than Barry Bonds. In fact, he basically lives across the street from Bonds, both ball players who were considered among the best to ever play the game. Both accused of using steroids, both called to testify about it under oath.
Does he not know that Bonds has been indicted for lying about steroids? This is practically a slow motion replay.
On NPR this morning they were saying that the syringes and bandages might be legally irrelevant if the chain of custody wasn’t intact. Even if his DNA is found, he could always say that they’d been tampered with somehow.
A combination of things, in my opinion, not necessarily in this order:
Congress does have the right, legally speaking, to horn in on baseball due to its antitrust exemption, and the people who investigate baseball like this get some TV time.
The FBI has put a lot of resources into investigation steroid distribution in recent years, and Clemens is casting doubt on one of their witnesses. That’s serious, at least in theory.
George Mitchell is one of their own, as an ex-Senator, and Clemens is the only player who has seriously contradicted the Mitchell Report.
In the end, Clemens contradicted himself on some significant points and didn’t answer some important questions, like Pettitte’s honesty and the abcess. McNamee looked like a sleaze, but he IS a sleaze, so that’s to be expected.
A hypothetical situation occured to me during lunch today: If someone “In the biz” accused a major league player of doing steroids, but it wasn’t true, how hard would it be for the defendant to defend his honor, as it were? Or would he have no choice but to take the blow to his credibility?
ESPN noticed another interesting discrepancy in Clemens’ testimony: Pettitte said he discussed HGH with Clemens in '99 or 2000. Clemens said those talks were about his wife’s interest in HGH, but when she did HGH in 2003, he said she used it without his knowledge.
Let’s say I witness a homicide and a year later it is finally my day to testify against the defendant. The defense attorney asks, “And you say you saw the killer’s face illuminated by the light of the moon?” I say, “Yes, that is what I said.” The defense attorney pulls out an almanac or something and demonstrates that on the night in question, there was no moon out.
That’s not perjury, it means I’ve made a bad witness of myself but since it is entirely plausible/possible I am simply misremembering an event I saw over a year ago that I just made a mistake.
All three examples are not the kind of thing I’d expect someone to go down for perjury over. Perjury isn’t just telling things that aren’t factually correct under oath, it is deliberate deception/lying. I think it will be very hard if not impossible to prove that Roger Clemens has committed perjury.
My impression is Barry Bonds is indicted because he said he didn’t knowingly use steroids, and the government has found damning physical evidence to prove otherwise (I haven’t heard an update on his case in awhile, but that was the impression I got when news broke of his indictment.) In Clemens case the only real evidence we’ll ever have that he used steroids or HGH is McNamee, and the word of one man is probably not going to get someone convicted of perjury. All the other stuff, it’s very doubtful you’d see a perjury indictment over Roger saying he wasn’t at a party he actually was it. How can you really demonstrate that he didn’t just misremember? The PED use is a different matter because clearly someone would remember whether or not they ever used steroids. It’s entirely plausible that you might not remember whether or not you attended a party like a decade ago–ballplayers probably go to a ton of parties every year.
If the syringes and pads are tested and provide dna Roger is cooked. If they do not bother wit them It is hard to prove and he will skate. It never got past he said /they said.
Roger on one side/Pettit
Pettite wife
McNamee
Stanton on the other
I don’t think the syringes matter one whit in a legal sense. There’s no provenance, no chain of custody, no way to prove they were never tampered with. OJ walked because that couldn’t be established and this stuff wouldn’t even be allowed in a criminal case. In the court of public opinion though and in their consistency with other things that have been put forth, they would appear to be at least another nail for the coffin, something tangible to go along with the verbal.
I think Roger did use some combination of illegals, but probably just in an as needed, recovery sense, never as part of a routine, strength building regimen. That Pettite and his wife’s testimony corroberates McNamee is too much to overcome any explanations Rog has offered to date. That’s kinda what I gathered from them, it wasn’t frequent but it did happen.
One thing that bugged the hell out of me about Clemens testimony though was that he proved very incapable, time and time again, of answering the damn question that was asked. He’s either much dumber than I’d previously realized or he had such a pre-fabricated list of things to say that his testimony came across as terribly rehearsed, never thoughtful and open. Even when tossed a softball about his workout regimen he went off in some altogether different direction. This happened again and again.
The discrepancies, the scripting, the motive, the bluster, it all bugs me. That he’s being treated as such a whipping boy when 89 others were accused bugs me too, but he’s handled this in a very poor manner and his actions since accused and the subsequent testimony haven’t really generated the perception that he’s unquestionably honest. I’ve never much cared for his arrogance and now it appears to be a considerable part of his undoing.