Clemens Trial Continues

Finally, the prosecution's star witness, Brian McNamee, began testifying this week.  While the defense has a treasure trove of impeachment material in terms of prior bad acts, the initial part of the cross examination has focused primarily on McNamee's lies or prior inconsistent statements about the specific allegations McNamee has made asserting he injected Clemens with steroids. Not that the media knows any better than anyone else, one reporter described McNamee as: "Well, I would have to say bluntly, he's the squirreliest witness I've ever seen. My colleague Lester Munson from ESPN calls him generically reprehensible. A lot of other reporters are less polite, and these are folks who don't particularly like Roger Clemens and have covered him."

This part of the cross examination was described as follows: "Rusty Hardin, has put up an easel and on it he's written three words: mistakes, memory - meaning memory problems - and lies. And then he asks the witness he's cross-examining, Mr. McNamee, to put his misstatements into one of those. Are they, you know, memory problems or mistakes or lies? And, over and over again, he's had to admit - although you've got to drag it out of him - that he first lied to federal agents, then to the Mitchell Commission, all of that before he came clean."

Mark my words when the jury begans to hear about McNamee's conduct with his fellow Yankees at the Florida hotel and his subsequent mis truths to law enforcement, it will be lights out for the prosecution.  Game, set, match..Hardin

Roger Clemens Will Be Acquitted

I concede that all the information I have learned is second hand.  What is going on in the courtroom may or may not be accurately reported.  But if the information is accurate, Rusty Hardin is going to win another one, Roger Clemens will be acquitted and become the second baseball player exonerated from having used steroids.

Aside from the fact that Hardin is an extremely skilled lawyer, the facts are starting to go Clemens' way.  While recent attention has focused on Andy Petite's equivocation of the exact nature of his conversation with Clemens, the real show will start when Hardin commences his cross examination of Brian McNamee.  For some strange reason, the national media has mentioned little if any of McNamee's checkered past.  For evidence geeks out there, suffice it to say, Hardin is going to have a field day with 608(b) type of evidence.  In play are numerous prior instances of untruthfulness that includes but is not limited to a bizarre 2001 incident in Florida.  It was briefly described by the defense team as follows: Mr. McNamee repeatedly lied to law enforcement officials conducting a felony criminal investigation in Florida. The investigation concerned a woman who met Mr. McNamee and others at a post-game gathering of New York Yankees players and personnel (other than Mr. Clemens) at a hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida on October 6, 2001, and the circumstances by
which she was rendered incoherent from unknowingly ingesting the “date rape” drug GHB and was found naked and intertwined with Mr. McNamee in the hotel swimming pool later that night. During the subsequent criminal investigation, the Government concedes, as it must, that Mr. McNamee provided false statements to Florida law enforcement officials who were investigating the rape incident.

Things continue to get worse for McNamee from there as detailed in court papers.  Mix in Hardin's skill, skepticism about Congress having the hearings to begin with, Petite's 50-50 comment, and McNamee's lack of credibility and viola: Not Guilty.