Congress Asks Justice Department to Investigate Tejada

On the radio they said this isn't about perjury, it's about lying to investigators, and it is a more serious crime than perjury.

 

If he goes to jail, then will the trade be rescinded?

 

Fail.

Lying to an investigator is not more serious than perjury.


Back to the "evidence" so far though, this is akin to the following:

Stoney goes to buy some heroin from his dealer, Zed. Stoney doesn't have enough cash on him right then though for the amount he wants to buy so he gives Zed a check (and no it doesn't say "heroin" in the memo line & we're just saying Zed knows Stoney well enough to take a check from him).

Zed gets popped by Vice for selling and is pressured to reveal his sources as well as his customers.

Zed gives up Stoney, among others, Vice finds the check Stoney wrote, which Zed acknowledges is for heroin.

Vice interrogates Stoney, who denies everything, but let's him go because Zed's word means jack & the check proves nothing.

Months later DA, in an election year, wants to show he's tough on crime, so he demands Vice go figure out a way to nail Stoney.

Stoney doesn't change his story & Vice is unable to find a videotape of the exchange, Stoney's use, or any heroin on Stoney to prove his case so the whole thing goes away.***

Ridiculous.

 

Nope.

It's quite sad if Ed Wade was blindsided by this.

 

There is no way in hell he or Drayton were blindsided by this.

I really don't think it's much of a stretch to say that there in no way in hell Tejada goes to jail over this either.

They knew what they were getting into & the risk level is low enough that it was acceptable to them.

 

Of course, the Mitchell investigation had exactly zero legal authority to talk to anyone. Anyone could just refuse to talk and there's nothing Mitchell could do. Mitchell himself said there were a vast number of people that he wanted to talk to and couldn't. The government has no such limitations.

What the Mitchell investigation uncovered is a tiny fraction of what the Feds can and have been doing.

 

Another interesting tidbit from the hearing:

Big-leaguers are banned from taking stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall unless it's needed for a medical condition like ADD. In 2006, the league granted 28 exemptions for players to take stimulants. In 2007, the number skyrocketed to 103--implying that the incidence of ADD in baseball is on the order of eight times greater than in the general population.

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_...l-already-losing-the-next-steroid-battle.aspx

 

Then WHY, pray tell, did they spend those millions of congressional dollars on it?

 

The Mitchell investigation was not related to Congress in any way - it was a MLB initiative. What congressional dollars were spent on the Mitchell investigation?

 

In other, ****tier, Tejada news, his brother was killed in a car wreck in the DR today.

Puts the congressional dog & pony show in perspective.

 

Rodney Harrison and Shawne Merriman are playing in the AFC championship this weekend...

 

Major, not to belabor the point, but unless they find someone willing to say that they "saw" Tejada injecting or injected Tejada, AND have some video evidence of it, OR have a recording of Tejada admitting he knew of other MLBers using, he will get off on perjury charges UNLESS he opens his mouth and makes statements to the contrary of what he said on the record before.

Again, I'm pretty sure Drayton & Wade did their due diligence on this, and I wouldn't be surprised if Tejada has also been coached about to do/say by his own legal team - maybe even Astros staff.

As to another point, I work in the legal compliance/investigations world and can tell you firsthand that the feds often exert enormous pressure on folks to say that things happened/people did things that are not necessarily true. DOJ is a political animal itself and as such its folks are under a tremendous amount of pressure to bring in results favorable to those controlling their pursestrings as well.

In fact, I still find it shocking that people question why McNamee might have lied about Clemens. I hope no one is naive enough to believe that the feds are above telling McNamee that unless he brought them a big fish he'd be headed to the can. As a non-wealthy guy facing prison threats, and with a sick kid to worry about, he had plenty of incentive to tell the feds exactly what they said they wanted to hear.

At the end of the day his word alone is not enough to nail Clemens. Clemens, so long as he doesn't change his story, gets out of it with a somewhat tarnished rep - but still - off with no real evidence that he did anything. And if McNamee doesn't change HIS story, his friendship with Clemens is trashed but he maintains to the feds that he told them the truth and avoids jail. In fact, I think that Clemens realizes that this is what is happening, and that's why neither one of them is changing their schtick one bit.

Finally, the feds/politicos at least got the huge name they wanted to use to stage their political theater, even if at the end of the day all the day was waste all of our ****ing time with this stupidity...

 

If Tejada said these things in an interview, as was reported, I doubt that it was under oath.

 

Really? You're baffled? There are a couple of big differences between the two that I can think of off the top of my head, i don't think it's that baffling.

First, MLB went a LONG time without even banning steroids until the pressure became unbearable. Steroid use in athletics was a problem as far back as the 70's. The fact taht they tacitly accepted it for a long time makes them stand out, IMO.

Second, MLB not only tolerated the use of steroids, but exploited them to recapture it's flagging popularity. They canceled the freaking season in 1994? Pretty despicable. Oh but the longball and Big Mac and sammy brought people back to the ballpark...with a wink and a nudge...

Now I'm not going to sit here and say guys in the NFL don't do this, they do obviously, along with a lot of other things, but league officials actually tried, or at least appeared to try, to not tolerate it.. In MLB, for the most part the league didn't even give a semblance of trying. In addition, the NFL is not a sport that people watch because it's clean, they watch it at least in part because it is violent, or because they like to drink beer or whatever. Beer, hot cheerleaders, on-field violence - those things are integral to the NFL and as a consequence a little bit of drug use to augment the violence is probably acceptable, subconsiously if not consciously.

Finally, the wistfulness that a few people put on MLB records and the mythologized images of babe ruth or field of dreams or whatever obviously makes the fact that baseball became dominated by roid-pumping sluggers intolerable for some.

 

It pales in comparison to lying to a federal grand jury....such as the case with Bonds. In fact, I'm sure that I've heard of such and act (lying to congress) being rather minute, comparably speaking, and that there are notable cases where nothing has come about or the person only faced misdemeanor charges.

 

I agree with this - my only point is that the only way to find those things is to conduct an investigation. Congress now believes there's a reasonable chance that Tejada lied to them - so they ask the DoJ to see if there's any solid evidence of it. A few months ago, no one would have thought these people stupid enough to write checks for steroids either - you never know what you can find until you go looking.

Athletes are clearly not the brightest people in the world - if Tejada was willing to write checks for steroids, he probably talked to a lot of people about his use or what not. You don't really need a smoking gun of video evidence or what not. If you find 10 people who are willing to say Tejada talked to them about steroids, you've got some pretty serious evidence there unless there's good reason for them all to be lying.

I dunno - they already had the huge name in Barry Bonds. As far as wasting our time, their wide ranging investigation has shut down dozens of illegal pharmacies and destroyed quite a few supply networks for steroids. I'm not sure it has been entirely a waste of time.

 

Still baffled...befuddled even.

Because I agree with what you just said but find it unresponsive to my befuddlement.

My point was that MLB players get villified for this. I think the league and executives are being slapped on the wrist in this whole deal, so I'm not really talking about what league officials did or didn't do.

I'm talking about how a guy like Shawn Merriman tests positive, serves a small suspension and no one gives a damn. He goes back to his endorsements.

Roger never tests positive...but someone claims he used to do it years ago...and people have to start deciding if they want him to speak at their convention any more...and everyone comes down on him like he shot their mother.

The difference in how people linked to steroids in football and how they're linked to steroids in baseball is big. And I don't get why...other than that baseball inflicted its own wound this time around with the Mitchell Report.

 

Why is Congress wasting Tax payers dollars on this garbage?


Don't they have a budget to balance and a war to end.

SHEESH !

DD

 

I don't understand what you don't understand about this?

The NFL (of course their system is not perfect) has RANDOM drug testing in place. At the time of the first Steroids hearing the NFL had a first time 4 game suspention which is = to around 40 games in the MLB. At that point baseball was giving players a "heads up" on when they would be tested (which at first was private to see how many were on it even though they gave notice and players names would not be let out) on there way to putting in a 10 game ban which = 1 game in the NFL.

The NFL has always been ahead of the curve in drug testing and I belive every NFL trainer and locker area have shelfs full of LEGAL supliments.

The NFL's players union is not as strong as the MLB union so

#1-when they have a much better policy in place + they agree to review it and adjust it with ease Congress says "these guys have it together"

Selig and Ferhr(sp) look like morons

As far as the NBA vs MLB goes I have seen zero evidence of widespread drug use in the NBA and zero evidence on how it will help you while we all know every player who takes drugs in baseball gets a little extra zip on that fastball or a little extra pop on that swing.

I love baseball (greatest game ever) but it's dirty, players union needs to be broken. Lock those guys out, break their union make it come back with a hard cap, no garanteed contracts and an olympic style drug policy