Damaging Information Said to Await Clemens
WASHINGTON — Roger Clemens will be confronted with a new and damaging affidavit from Andy Pettitte when he appears before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Wednesday to testify about allegations that he used performance-enhancing drugs, two lawyers familiar with the matter said late Tuesday.
Clemens will also be asked about corroborating information that committee staff members developed on their own that ties Clemens to such drugs, the lawyers said. That information, they said, stands separate and apart from the assertions made about Clemens by his former personal trainer, Brian McNamee, who contends that he injected Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone from 1998 to 2001.
The two lawyers familiar with what may be confronting Clemens at the hearing spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. They would not reveal details of the new Pettitte affidavit or of the new information obtained apart from McNamee’s assertions.
“The committee is not messing around and has other damaging evidence against Roger,” one of the lawyers said.
The other lawyer said, “Andy said enough to really hurt Roger.”
Clemens continued to insist on Tuesday that he never received injections. He made those denials while visiting privately with six more members of the committee, bringing his three-day lobbying total to 25 of the 40 committee members. But in many respects, it was the calm before a momentous clash for Clemens, the most decorated pitcher in baseball history.
On Wednesday, he will sit before the committee, with McNamee, in a nationally televised event that will begin at 10 a.m. in a wood-paneled hearing room in the Rayburn Office Building. They will be joined by one other person — the lawyer Charles P. Scheeler, who helped produce the report on baseball and drugs prepared by former Senator George J. Mitchell.
Scheeler will answer questions about the report but is also expected to sit between Clemens and McNamee. “That’s 99 percent of the reason he’s there,” a committee staff member said.
A Congressional staff member familiar with the recent events said that 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 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.
Pettitte was excused from testifying after his lawyers said he did not want to provide negative information about Clemens, his former longtime friend, teammate and workout partner, in the glare of a national spotlight. Pettitte has admitted to taking injections of H.G.H., as McNamee has asserted, and it is believed that he made statements in his deposition that would not be helpful to Clemens’s cause.
The chairman of the committee, Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, is expected to read portions of Pettitte’s affidavit during the hearing and ask Clemens to respond, in what could be a dramatic and awkward moment for both players, and, for that matter, the entire sport.
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.
Clemens even wrote his own opening statement to the committee, one of his lawyers, Lanny A. Breuer, said in a phone interview Tuesday night.
“It’s completely Roger speaking from the heart,” he said. “We look forward to the committee and the country judging this man.”
McNamee, 40, gave a seven-hour deposition on Thursday. He has told investigators and Mitchell that he injected Clemens with steroids at least 12 times in 1998, 2000 and 2001, and at least four times with H.G.H. in 2000. But he has added vivid details to his account this year. He also handed over syringes and bloody gauze that he said were used when injecting Clemens in 2001 and had been saved since then.
McNamee’s newer details 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. 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 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 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, Waxman and Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia, formally asked the Department of Justice to investigate shortstop Miguel Tejada for suspected false statements in 2005. That referral was made in part because 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 will be 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 and who is expected to be in attendance at the hearing.
Irwin Rogers, another I.R.S. agent, and Heather Young, an F.B.I. agent, are also expected to attend the hearing. Their presence underlines the dangerous path Clemens could be on as he continues to insist that McNamee is lying.
Meanwhile, Clemens visited six more members of the committee in their offices on Tuesday afternoon. It brought his three-day total to 14 of the 22 Democrats and 11 of the 18 Republicans. Mark Souder, a Republican from Indiana, refused to meet with Clemens. “They were very persistent,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “I had to tell them, ‘It’s not a scheduling problem — it’s that I don’t want to meet with him.’ ”
Souder added of Clemens: “He’s wandering around the Hill like it’s a campaign. It’s unseemly.”
Diane E. Watson, Democrat of California, emerged from a meeting with Clemens saying it was mostly anecdotal but would help her evaluate his testimony.
“My staff told me, ‘Don’t do this,’ but I said, ‘No, I really want to,’ ” she said.
Asked about Clemens’s motives for meeting her, Watson said, “I found him, you know, very charming.
“I’ve been in public life for a quarter of a century, and I’ve had every lobbyist in the world in front of me,” she said.
Earlier Tuesday, the committee held a two-hour hearing on growth hormone and vitamin B12. Four medical experts testified that H.G.H. could be harmful if used for illegal uses like bodybuilding or so-called anti-aging. Side effects may include diabetes, joint pain and cancer.
“Doctors who are prescribing the drug to enhance performance or to reverse aging are actually breaking the law,” Waxman said.
The law will be at issue again on Wednesday, but this time the question will be who is telling the truth, who is lying and who is risking a possible perjury charge.
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