Report: Evidence may show Clemens used drugs
NEW YORK (AP) – Brian McNamee has turned over physical evidence that Roger Clemens’ former trainer believes will show the seven-time Cy Young Award winner used performance-enhancing drugs, McNamee’s attorneys told The New York Daily News. In the report, an anonymous source close to McNamee said the former trainer gave the Justice Department’s BALCO investigators vials with traces of steroids and growth hormone, as well as bloodstained syringes and gauze pads.
McNamee’s attorneys told the newspaper he has turned over the evidence to federal investigators but did not provide details of the evidence.
“This is evidence the government has that we believe will corroborate Brian in every significant way,” one of McNamee’s lawyers, Earl Ward, said in an article posted on the newspaper’s Web site Tuesday.
McNamee told former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell he injected Clemens with performance-enhancing drugs at least 16 times in 1998, 2000 and 2001. Clemens has vehemently denied ever using performance-enhancing drugs.
McNamee is scheduled to be interviewed by House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform lawyers Thursday in preparation for next week’s congressional hearing following up on the Mitchell Report on doping in baseball.
The newspaper reported Justice Department officials have sent the evidence to a lab for testing. If the materials prove to contain traces of drugs and blood, prosecutors may attempt to get a court order for a DNA sample from Clemens.
“We will provide Congress with corroborative physical evidence that takes this case out of the he-said, she-said purview,” another McNamee lawyer, Richard Emery, told the Daily News. “From our point of view, this corroborates that Brian told the truth from Day One and Clemens has not.”
McNamee kept syringes, gauze pads and vials from the 2000 and 2001 seasons because he feared Clemens would deny illicit drug use if the matter was ever investigated, according to the anonymous source cited by the newspaper.
Copyright Associated Press 2008