Apparently, Henry Waxman now regrets holding Tuesday’s showdown hearing between Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee:
WASHINGTON — A day after a dramatic, nationally televised hearing that pitted Roger Clemens against his former personal trainer and Democrats against Republicans, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said Thursday that he regretted holding the hearing in the first place.
The chairman, Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said the four-hour hearing unnecessarily embarrassed Clemens, who he thought did not tell the truth, as well as the trainer, Brian McNamee, who he thought was unfairly attacked by committee Republicans.
“I think Clemens and McNamee both came out quite sullied, and I didn’t think it was a hearing that needed to be held in order to get the facts out about the Mitchell report,” Waxman said.
“I’m sorry we had the hearing. I regret that we had the hearing. And the only reason we had the hearing was because Roger Clemens and his lawyers insisted on it.”
First of all, even if that’s true, the Committee didn’t need to accede to Clemens’ request. They could have, and should have, said no.
Second, Clemens’ lawyers dispute Waxman’s version of events:
Waxman’s regrets, and his assertion that Clemens’s side was responsible for the hearing taking place, was assailed last night by Clemens’s lead attorney, Rusty Hardin, who said Waxman’s statements were “unbelievable, disingenuous and outrageous.”
“He is the one who created this circus in the first place,” Hardin said of Waxman, contending that Clemens and his lawyers had asked several weeks ago for the hearing to be called off, only to be rebuffed by Waxman’s staff.
“We didn’t think any good would come out of having a food fight with the accuser,” Hardin said in reference to McNamee. But once the depositions were taken last week, he said, the Clemens side felt it had no choice but to proceed, fearing that the committee would use the depositions to produce a hostile written report. “We wanted this out in the open,” Hardin said.
Understandable, but, considering the likely consequences, perhaps not the wisest of decisions.
February 27th, 2008 at 8:14 am
[...] before this month’s hearings, the Roger Clemens case had already taken a bizarre turn when it was revealed that Brian McNamee had [...]
February 28th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
[...] could end pretty badly for Clemens. Which is sad for many reasons, not the least of them being that this hearing never should have been conducted in the first place. [...]