August 19, 2010
Clemens Is Indicted for Perjury in Testimony
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
Federal authorities have indicted Roger Clemens on charges of making false statements to Congress about his use of performance-enhancing drugs.
The 19-page indictment charges Clemens with three counts of making false statements and two counts of perjury in connection with his February 2008 testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
That testimony came in a public hearing in which Clemens and his former trainer Brian McNamee, testifying under oath, directly contradicted each other about whether Clemens had used the banned substances.
The committee held the hearing just two months after McNamee first tied Clemens to the use of the substances in George J. Mitchell’s report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. After Mitchell released the report, Clemens claimed McNamee made up the allegations.
Federal authorities had McNamee cooperate with them in 2008 to avoid charging him with steroid distribution. Clemens becomes the second baseball star from the past decade to be indicted for making false statements about his use of performance-enhancing drugs.
In 2007, federal authorities in San Francisco indicted Barry Bonds, the career home run leader, on charges he perjured himself before a grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative. Bonds, who has retired, is scheduled to go on trial next March.
Like Bonds, Clemens had an illustrious baseball career, like Bonds, his his entanglement with baseball’s drug issue had jeopardized his chances of going to the Hall of Fame. They are scheduled to appear together on the 2013 ballot.
Clemens last pitched in the major leagues in 2007. He sat out the first part of that season, returned to the Yankees with a dramatic announcement from George Steinbrenner’s box at Yankee Stadium and then, nagged by leg injuries, pitched inconsistently once he was back in uniform.
His final appearance, in a first-round playoff series that October which the Yankees ultimately lost to Cleveland, ended abruptly in the third inning of Game 3, when he exited with an aching hamstring. He was 45 years old and he never pitched in the major leagues again.
Just two months later, the Mitchell report was released, linking nearly 100 former and current players to the use of performance-enhancers. Among those named were Clemens and Andy Pettitte, Clemens’s good friend and his teammate on both the Yankees and Houston Astros.
Pettitte quickly reacted to the report with a statement that admitted he had used human growth hormone. Clemens, however, was defiant, adamantly denying that he McNamee had ever injected him with steroids or H.G.H., as the Mitchell report stated.
He repeated his denials on a “60 Minutes†broadcast and in a press conference in which he and his lawyer, Rusty Hardin, played a tape of a telephone conversation between McNamee and Clemens.
Ultimately, he took his denials to Congress, where he and McNamee disputed each other in a hearing before the House Government Reform Committee that broke down along partisan lines, the Republicans generally siding with Clemens and the Democrats with McNamee.
Nevertheless, the Democratic chairman of the committee, Henry Waxman of California, and the ranking Republican, Tom Davis of Virginia, then jointly signed a letter to the Justice Department, asking that Clemens be investigated for perjury because of his statements he made to the panel denying any use of performance-enhancers.
