Below The Beltway

As I noted yesterday, lawyers for Brian McNamee are claiming that their client has physical evidence that corroborates his claim that he injected Roger Clemens with steroids. Today, we learn that the evidence, which will apparently be revealed today, consists of syringes and gauze with Clemens’ blood on them:

Brian McNamee has given federal investigators bloody gauze pads and syringes he said he used to inject Roger Clemens with steroids and human-growth hormone in 2000 and 2001, a lawyer familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

The former personal trainer hopes that DNA and chemical tests on the materials will prove he injected Clemens, as he contends, and thus prove that Clemens lied in a sworn deposition to Congressional investigators on Tuesday, the lawyer said.

If Clemens did not tell the truth in his deposition on Tuesday — and if he repeats his statements at a House Oversight committee hearing set for next Wednesday — the seven-time Cy Young Award winner could face charges of lying to federal officials, which is punishable by up to five years in prison.

The lawyer, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the case, said McNamee had injected Clemens at the pitcher’s apartment in New York and then taken the syringes and pads to his home in Queens, where he had a medical waste-disposal box.

But McNamee, a former police officer, never disposed of the evidence, the lawyer said, and now those items , if authentic, could have a bearing on the Clemens-McNamee drama.

Allegedly, McNamee has held on to this stuff for the past seven years but didn’t tell George Mitchell’s investigators about it because of a “sense of loyalty” to Clemens:

[T]hat sentiment apparently changed after Clemens held a news conference in Houston on Jan. 7 and played a tape of a phone conversation he had secretly recorded with McNamee on Jan. 4. “It’s war,” one of McNamee’s lawyers said after the tape was played.

In fact, later that same week, Jeff Novitzky, the Internal Revenue Service special agent who has led the criminal investigations into steroid distribution in sports, and two assistant United States attorneys from California traveled to New York, in part for the drug-related sentencing of Marion Jones in Westchester County.

But before the sentencing occurred, Novitzky and the prosecutors met with McNamee and his lawyers, on Jan. 10. And it was at that meeting that they were given the physical evidence, the lawyer said.

The Clemens camp is remaining defiant:

Clemens’s Washington attorney, Lanny Breur, issued a statement late Wednesday afternoon that contended that the notion that McNamee had saved gauze pads and syringes for seven years “defies all sensibility.”

“It is just not credible — who in their right mind does such a thing?” Breur said.

Breuer called McNamee a “troubled” man who had lied in the past and said that he now “apparently has manufactured evidence.”

I’ll admit that there’s something incredibly odd about the idea that McNamee held onto bloody needles and gauze pads for seven years but, then, this whole story has become pretty odd.