Hilarious:

“This is a textbook case of slander: If steroids had not injected themselves—maliciously and with premeditation—into Mr. Clemens’ bloodstream on multiple occasions, people would not be accusing my client of taking steroids,” Clemens’ lawyer Rusty Hardin said in a statement released Tuesday.

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With Congressional grandstanding comes legal games.

Right now, Roger Clemens does not have to testify in front of Congress or agree to a deposition in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Henry Waxman and Co. have asked Clemens to cooperate, but Clemens would simply be granting Congress a favor in doing so. He has yet to be legally compelled to testify.

And guess what? It doesn’t sound like he’s too keen to come forward on his own. T.J. Quinn has the story:

After saying repeatedly that Roger Clemens will answer any questions Congress wants to ask him, a source familiar with the inquiry said Saturday night that attorney Rusty Hardin is hedging over the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s request to depose Clemens under oath next week because it might interfere with his defamation lawsuit against personal trainer Brian McNamee.

The source said Hardin is also making “noises” about not turning over a taped conversation between McNamee and two investigators for Hardin’s office recorded Dec. 12, the day before the Mitchell report was released.

Raise if your hand if you’re surprised. Exactly.

While tales of reported abscesses on Clemens’ buttocks may end up throwing McNamee’s credibility into doubt, I’m not at all surprised that Hardin would opt not to have Clemens testify in front of Congress. Our esteemed legislative body isn’t the tightest lipped organization, and Hardin wouldn’t want his legal strategy plastered all over the pages of the nation’s newspapers. On the surface, this does represent an about-face for Hardin who said that Clemens would definitely testify at a hearing, but a deposition may hold more legal weight.

Meanwhile, Quinn’s sources say that nothing has been decided yet. Clemens may yet agree to be deposed or Congress could resort to a subpoena. No one knows. For a change.

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There’s been plenty on the Brian McNamee/Roger Clemens front over the past few days. Although I’d love nothing more than to see this whole thing just disappear, it’s not going to, which means we’re stuck with it. First thing I caught on it this morning was a piece on ESPN, where McNamee’s lawyers are looking to expose a conversation between McNamee and Clemens which took place on the day before the Mitchell report was revealed.

“They should ask for the entire tape of the interview back in December. That’s the tape they should ask for,” Earl Ward, one of McNamee’s lawyers, said Tuesday. “According to Brian, they tried to get him to recant. Brian said, look, what I told the [Mitchell and federal] investigators was the truth.”

If that’s the extent of the conversation, I’m not sure how much it helps McNamee’s case. However, if his lawyers are pushing for its release, there’s bound to be a bit more revealing information contained therein.

But then I caught a piece in Slam! Sports which aims to trounce McNamee’s credibility. In fact, just three paragraphs in, we’re treated to this quote:

“I hope baseball is not putting all of its case on this one witness because in my 32 years as an investigator, I would not find him to be very credible,” Florida state attorney office investigator Don Crotty said yesterday.

Crotty’s distrust of McNamee stems from an incident back in 2001, where a number of Yankees were having a party in Florida — which incidentally started in Chuck Knoblauch’s room. Outside, investigators found a woman passed out in a swimming pool. She had been drugged with GHB. McNamee was implicated, but never charged, since prosecutors didn’t think the victim’s case would hold up — because he had slept with a married member of the team. Crotty believed that McNamee was dishonest with him when questioned pursuant to the case.

It also appears that Brian referred to himself sometimes as Dr. McNamee:

An investigation showed his doctorate earned at Columbus University in Louisiana is now Columbus out of Mississippi, since Louisiana closed its operation in 2001 for handing out degrees to many who did “little or no academic work.”

The article says that Clemens actually believed that McNamee had a medical degree.

Also discrediting McNamee is his tenure with the NYPD. Though he was involved in many high-profile cases, including the death of Eric Clapton’s son, he’ll never shed the 30-day suspension he received for his negligence in the escape of a prisoner.

And then we have the issue of physical proof of Roger’s use of steroids. The Blue Jays team chiropractor at the time Roger was with the team didn’t see the telltale signs of steroid use:

“I worked with him daily and didn’t see any signs of steroid use,” Dr. Patrick Graham told The Sun yesterday. “I didn’t notice any rashes, acne or increased muscle mass or structure.”
…
“I think I would have seen signs of it,” he said, adding he always thought the Rocket’s success in Toronto was because of his newly developed “split-fingered fastball.”

Even after Clemens left the Jays organization, he would come in for a back treatment whenever in Toronto and Graham said he observed no body changes. “I haven’t seen him for two years, but I just don’t think he was on steroids.”

Professional trainer Phil Zullo, of North York’s Pro-Fit, agrees — saying if Clemens took the amount of steroids and the type McNamee alleges in the report, he would have ended up looking like Hulk Hogan. “With the way Roger works out and trains, he would have been a giant,” said Zullo, who did not work with Clemens but has always been known to be against the use of any substances for the amateur and professional athletes he trains.

True, none of this proves that Clemens didn’t do steroids. But then again, is he ever going to be able to prove that?

My stance remains the same as it has since the beginning, in that I don’t think he has to prove that he didn’t. Clearly, my opinion differs with much of the public. But why should Roger have to go to these lengths to defend himself against one person, with a spotty history, who was facing jail time? If there was more than one source of this allegation, then yeah, maybe Roger has to up his defense. But I don’t see the reason to assume the worst when we’re talking about the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.

Once again, though, it’s my deepest desire to see this story go away.

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Sounding a lot like Joe Torre did last week, Hank Steinbrenner issued his own half-hearted views on Roger Clemens. “I thought the media commentary after the press conference was over was a little harsh,” Steinbrenner said on Monday night. “Too much rush to judgment in this country. As far as whether he’s telling the truth or not, I have no clue. But I’m not going to say, well, he’s lying, like everybody on TV did after he was done.” Steinbrenner also noted that PED use in baseball went far beyond the limited New York-centric scope of Mitchell Report. No big surprises here.

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This one’s for you, steve. As we all know, Roger Clemens held a press conference this afternoon to discuss the Mitchell Report and his response to it. To put it bluntly, the press conference was a circus through and through. For the most part, Clemens and his lawyer rightly lashed out at the media for the piss poor coverage of Clemens’ response and their unreasonable demands for an immediate response from the Rocket. The conference ended with Rocket basically storming away from the dais.

Meanwhile, the other part — a replaying of the recorded phone conversation from Friday between Clemens and Brian McNamee — was fairly anticlimactic. While Clemens’ lawyer claims the ambiguous phone call in which McNamee never says he or Clemens is lying about their stances on Clemens’ injections — steroids or B12, respectively — the phone call wasn’t exactly a smoking gun that alleviated all doubt of guilt from the shoulders of Clemens.

Tellingly enough, Clemens did not really answer the question when someone asked him why he let McNamee inject him, and he said that McNamee provided his injections. So basically, we can see the defense he’s carving out for himself: He thought B12 just meant B12 while McNamee, taking a cue from accepted baseball insider lingo, thought that B12 meant steroids. So there you go. We’re right back where we started, and this pissing contest is just getting started.

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I really, really, really don’t want to write about this, so I’ll just lay it out there. Roger Clemens is suing Brian McNamee for defamation, stemming from McNamee’s testimony to the Mitchell investigation. Wake me when this is over.

Update by Ben: A copy of the suit is available here as a PDF for those interested. One of us will take a look through it later in a post.

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As we all get ready to ignore watch Roger Clemens’ appearance on 60 Minutes tonight, take a read through this excellent piece at Baseball Analysts by Pat Jordan. In it, he discusses his experiences covering Roger Clemens in 2001. The focus is, of course, on Clemens’ relationship with Brian McNamee and the way the Rocket would seemingly blindly follow McNamee, who Jordan calls “sour, suspicious, and taciturn.” It certainly makes me wonder why teams would so accepting of these sketchy trainers during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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Scott Proctor’s Arm directs our attention to a piece in The Daily News about Roger Clemens. This time, Hank Steinbrenner opened his month and smart words flowed out: The Yankees will not be signing Clemens in 2008. Well, phew. Talk about $20 million poorly spent.

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This is just weird. As per The Post’s Yankees Blog, Roger Clemens’ people are on the prowl:

Roger Clemens’ attorney has launched his own investigation into whether the Yankees pitcher used performance-enhancing substances as the Mitchell Report claimed.

“We are convinced the conclusions in Mitchell’s report are wrong and are investigating the findings ourselves,” lawyer Rusty Hardin told The New York Times. “At this stage we have uncovered a lot of logical people who we thought Mitchell was going to talk to but never talked to him or his investigators. That’s troubling.”

Who knows if this is all just for show? No one else in the Mitchell Report is doing much denying, and no one’s launching their own investigation. But no one else in the report is one of the top pitchers of all time with a Hall of Fame reputation on the line.

I hope Clemens’ people release their own version of the report, and I have to wonder if this will be a farce of an investigation or the thing that brings down the Mitchell Report. Either way, this is one surreal development.

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Roger Clemens posted a video on YouTube in which he defends himself from the accusations in the Mitchell Report. Take a look:

As ESPN reports, Clemens will sit for a 60 Minutes interview in an effort to clear his name.

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