Both Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee were talking to Congressional investigators today about steroids and baseball:
Roger Clemens met with members of the House Oversight committee Thursday, including the chairman, the same day his former trainer, Brian McNamee, gave a deposition to Congressional staffers investigating reports that Clemens used performance-enhancing drugs.
The two men’s visits to Capitol Hill come a day after a lawyer familiar with the case said McNamee gave federal investigators bloody gauze pads, vials and syringes McNamee said he used to inject Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone in 2000 and 2001.
McNamee, Clemens’s former personal trainer, hopes that DNA and chemical tests on the materials will support his contention that he injected Clemens with those drugs, the lawyer said.
In the end, though, it looks like McNamee’s evidence won’t really amount to anything:
The syringes, vials and gauze pads that Brian McNamee has turned over to federal investigators to back up his contention that he injected Roger Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone will be the subject of a strenuous attack if they enter the courtroom, according to medical and legal experts.
Scientific experts said there was no known method to date steroids or human growth hormone.
The syringes, vials and gauze pads are said to date from 2000 and 2001, part of a four-year period in which McNamee contends he gave Clemens drug injections. But even if the physical evidence tests positive for Clemens’s DNA and, say, steroids, Clemens’s lawyers could argue that McNamee added steroid traces to the original evidence in a bid to incriminate Clemens, experts say.
“You can test to figure out what the substance is, but you cannot figure out how old it is,” Dr. Don Catlin, the former director of the Olympic testing lab at U.C.L.A., said in a telephone interview.
There is no way to date blood either, Catlin said, which means there may not be a conclusive way to establish that the syringes, vials and pads were from 2000 and 2001.
Not to mention the fact that McNamee’s story just doesn’t sound plausible:
[P]hysical evidence that is said to have resided in McNamee’s home for at least seven years has been handed to federal investigators. But what happened during that period?
“The handling of the syringes will be a very powerful argument on Clemens’s behalf,” Catlin said. “In doping, the issue of chain of custody is always raised and these syringes appear to have been handled by the accuser. It’s generally the first line of attack from the lawyers.”
In addition, legal experts said that questions could arise about why McNamee did not initially hand over the physical evidence to federal authorities or investigators for George J. Mitchell.
As I noted when this all started, people are going to believe what they want to believe.
