Clemens, McNamee face off in D.C.

February 13, 2008

In a tense and often heated congressional hearing, Roger Clemens told a House oversight committee on Wednesday that he was talking about his wife’s use of human-growth hormone, not his own, when he discussed the subject with Andy Pettitte, and that he was shocked to learn later that Mr. Pettitte had used the hormone himself.

Responding to an affidavit Mr. Pettitte filed with the committee saying he and Mr. Clemens had discussed Mr. Clemens’s use of performance-enhancing drugs, Mr. Clemens said Mr. Pettitte must have misunderstood him, and that he had never used the hormone. In answer to a question at the hearing, he said Mr. Pettitte would have had no motive to lie about the matter.

But Congressman Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, pounded Mr. Clemens over the statements Mr. Pettitte made under oath, and appeared to question his credibility.

“Mr. Clemens, once again I remind you, you are under oath,” Mr. Cummings said.

In response to Mr. Cumming’s questions about whether Mr. Clemens believed Mr. Pettitte was lying, Mr. Clemens said, “I think he misremembers our conversation.”

The hearing provided dramatic theater. It was marked by tense and at times even awkward exchanges between the committee members, Mr. Clemens, and Brian McNamee, the former trainer who told investigators that he had injected Mr. Clemens with performance enhancing drugs.

Mr. McNamee, who wore a dark suit and sat one person away from Mr. Clemens, has said that he injected Mr. Clemens’s wife, Debbie, with growth hormone in late 2002 or early 2003. He also says he injected Mr. Clemens himself with H.G.H. in 2000 and with steroids in 1998, 2000 and 2001. Mr. McNamee stood by those assertions in his opening statement at the hearing, while Mr. Clemens adamantly denied the accusations.

As the hearing got under way, the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, seemed to undercut Mr. McNamee’s credibility by saying that he had misled investigators at one point and withheld evidence. But he then turned shifted his attention to Mr. Clemens and harshly criticized him, saying the committee had clear evidence that Mr. Clemens lied during a deposition and made statements that were “contradicted by statements from other committee witnesses or simply implausible.”

“During his deposition he made statements we know are untrue and he made them with the same earnestness that many of the committee members observed in person,” Mr. Waxman said.

He described a sequence of events that suggested Mr. Clemens had not told the truth. He pointed out that Mr. Pettitte, in his deposition, had described a 1999 or 2000 conversation in which he said Mr. Clemens “told me he had taken H.G.H.”

In 2005, Mr. Waxman said, Mr. Pettitte asked Mr. Clemens what he should say if he was ever asked whether he had taken performance-enhancing drugs, and Mr. Clemens replied that Mr. Pettitte was mistaken and that he had been talking about his wife.

However, Mr. Waxman said, Mr. Clemens’ wife did not take H.G.H. until 2003, so Mr. Clemens could not possibly have been talking about that in 1999 or 2000. The timing seemed to contradict one of Mr. Clemens’s main defenses.

Also, he said, Mr. Pettitte told his wife about the 1999 or 2000 conversation shortly after it occurred.

Mr. Waxman said Mr. Pettitte acknowledged that Mr. McNamee had injected him with the hormone in 2002, and also that he had injected himself two more times in 2004, which had not previously been reported to the committee of inquiry headed by former Senator George J. Mitchell or to anyone else.

Mr. Waxman said the House committee had more power than Mr. Mitchell to investigate the issue of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball deeply.

“It’s impossible to believe that this is a simple misunderstanding,” Mr. Waxman said. “Someone isn’t telling the truth.”

Mr. Clemens, who read a prepared opening statement, spoke about his upbringing — “my hard work and dedication were instrumental to me achieving many career goals” — his children, visiting American troops overseas, and, finally, Mr. McNamee

“McNamee was good at what he did helping me exercise, diet, and stay in shape,” Mr. Clemens said. “We shared an interest in grueling, military-style workouts, but I never asked him nor did he ever give me steroids or human growth hormone.

“I had no idea that this man would exploit the trust I gave him to try to save his own skin by making up lies that have devastated me and my family.”

At the end of his statement, Mr. Clemens said, “How in the world can I prove a negative? No matter what we discuss here today, I am never going to have my name restored. I know that a lot of people want me to say that I have taken steroids and be done with it. But I cannot in good conscience admit to doing something that I did not do; even if it would be easier to do.”

But Mr. McNamee, who spoke immediately after Mr. Clemens, insisted he was lying. “I have no reason to lie, and every reason not to — if I do lie, I will be prosecuted,” he said. “I was never promised any special treatment or consideration for fingering star players.”

Mr. McNamee explained why he held on to syringes from 2001 that he says will have steroids and Mr. Clemens’s blood on them. The syringes, now in the hands of federal authorities in California, were kept in his basement for six years even as Mr. Clemens continued to employ him as a trainer.

“To put it in context, the issue of steroids and performance enhancing drugs in baseball was starting to pick up steam in 2000,” Mr. McNamee said in the statement. “While I liked and admired Roger Clemens, I don’t think that I ever really trusted him. Maybe my years as a New York City police officer had made me wary, but I just had that sense that if this ever blew up and things got messy, Roger would be looking out for number one. I viewed the syringes as evidence that would prevent me from being the only fall guy.”

After Mr. McNamee and Mr. Clemens read their opening statements, the panel of congressman on the House Oversight committee took turns needling them over inconsistencies in their statements and depositions. In one particularly testy exchange, Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, told Mr. McNamee point blank that he did not believe him. “Why did you keep those needles and gauze pads,” Mr. Burton said.

Mr. McNamee responded that he kept the materials because he was afraid Mr. Clemens would later hurt him.

“I have done things for other people and been hurt by it so I held on to it,” McNamee said.

“Why didn’t you give them to the Mitchell report?” Mr. Burton replied.

“I felt horrible to be in the position I was in,” Mr. McNamee said.

At that point, Mr. Burton exploded.

“Gee wiz, are you kidding me!” he said. “I know the one thing I don’t believe, that’s you.”

The tough questions from the committee members provided dramatic and awkward moments for Mr. Clemens and Mr. McNamee. The questions and answers became so heated that at one moment a lawyer for Mr. Clemens, Lanny Breuer, got up from his seat behind Mr. Clemens and blurted out that he wanted to speak in place of Mr. Clemens.

“I’m sorry, the rules don’t provide for it,” Mr. Waxman said in response.

Sitting between Mr. Clemens and Mr. McNamee at the witness table in the wood-paneled hearing room in the Rayburn Office Building on Wednesday was another witness — the lawyer Charles P. Scheeler, who helped produce the Mitchell report — who did not give an opening statement but was available to answer questions. Physically separating Mr. McNamee from Mr. Clemens at the table is “99 percent of the reason he’s there,” a committee staff member said before the hearing. Mr. Scheeler did not speak until he was addressed by one of the congressman about two hours into the hearing.

A Congressional staff member familiar with the recent events said that Mr. Pettitte gave the new affidavit — which is distinct from the two-and-a-half-hour deposition he provided last week — in lieu of appearing before the committee. Another staff member said the affidavit, which Mr. Pettitte signed, was being closely guarded by committee staff members and leadership, and had not been given to other members of the 40-member panel on Tuesday for fear it would be leaked.

Mr. Pettitte was excused from testifying after his lawyers said he did not want to provide negative information about Mr. Clemens, his former longtime friend, teammate and workout partner, in the glare of a national spotlight. Mr. Pettitte has admitted to taking injections of H.G.H., as Mr. McNamee has asserted, and it is believed that he made statements in his deposition that would not be helpful to Mr. Clemens’s cause.

Mr. Clemens, 45, of Houston, gave a five-hour sworn deposition to the committee on Feb. 5 and, his lawyer says, he wants to testify publicly in a bid to restore his reputation as one of the game’s greatest pitchers.

Mr. McNamee’s newer details, meanwhile, raise the issue of whether he violated the proffer agreement he signed last summer with federal prosecutors to tell them the truth in order to avoid prosecution. Mr. McNamee’s lawyers said the prosecutors accepted his new information as merely having been omitted, rather than as being untrue. The prosecutors declined comment.

“We’ve got the truth on our side,” Richard Emery, a lawyer for Mr. McNamee, said in a phone interview Tuesday. “It should be unequivocally clear that Roger, if he contradicts Brian, will not be telling the truth.”

Assuming that the testimony of Messrs. Clemens and McNamee continues to collide Wednesday, the committee is unlikely to make a referral to the Department of Justice to investigate either one of them for lying under oath, a committee staff member said Tuesday. Instead, it will allow the Department of Justice to make its own determination.

“The D.O.J. can do what it wants,” the staff member said.

Last month, Mr. Waxman and Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia and the ranking Republican member of the committee, formally asked the Department of Justice to investigate shortstop Miguel Tejada for suspected false statements in 2005. That referral was made in part because Mr. Tejada made his statements during a private interview with committee staff members in 2005. Those statements would not have been known to other federal authorities, including the Justice Department, the staff member said.

But the Clemens and McNamee testimony is on plain view for all to see — including Jeff Novitzky, the I.R.S. special agent from California who has led the federal government’s investigations into the distribution of performance-enhancing drugs. Mr. Novitzky and two other federal agents, Irwin Rogers of the I.R.S. and Heather Young of the F.B.I., are also in attendance at the hearing.

Their presence underlines the dangerous path Mr. Clemens could be on as he continues to insist that Mr. McNamee is lying. Underlying all the drama and the awkward answers at the hearing was the specter that one of the two men was risking a possible perjury charge.

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