Roger Clemens gets a mistrial.
Roger is a baseball pitcher, but this isn't about baseball. My limpid interest in the professional version of the pastime died years ago when it bloated its roster and schedules to commandeer teevee time that would otherwise have been filled with synchronized swimming. It isn't even about Clemens as such. He may be an admirable man with seven Cy Young awards. He may be a jerk, thug, dope addict, or golfer for all I know or care.
Clemens may or may not have taken steroids when he was winning all those trophies. After he got famous enough, he was accused of it. So what? At the time there was no law forbidding it. If he doped himself he violated a private contract with a private employer.
Enter Henry Waxman, a righteous congressthing representing the virtuous settlement of Beverly Hills. Hank summoned him to testify under oath before his House Oversight Committee. Roger said he took no steroids. Others said he did. Waxman believed the others and called the federal cops.
The charge was perjury, lying to Congress, which is like charging a guy in a Nevada whore house with eyeballing a boob.
The prosecutors had to win this one to uphold the principle that citizens may not lie. That usurps a congressional privilege. So the desperate federal lawyers decided to ignore explicit directions from Judge Reggie Walton, and I think one of the lessons here is that you don't piss off a guy like Reggie by presenting evidence he had explicitly forbidden.
"A first-year law student would know that you can't bolster the credibility of one witness with clearly inadmissible evidence," Walton said, raising his voice in anger at (prosecutor Steven) Durham."
(That should be a career buster for Steve, but he works for Holder so you never know.)
You may want to consider all this in terms of cost -- millions of dollars to hound a meaningless player of a boy's game at a time when we're scaring Hell out of grandma, telling her she may starve in the cold when her social security checks stop coming.
You may want to wonder how much more it will cost if the feds decide it's worth trying to get around his double-jeopardy protection and try him again.
The larger question here is about how petty an alleged transgression must be to avoid becoming a subject of monumental government concern.
Roger, I don't know you, never will, but, by God, I'm glad you beat those overbearing, self-important, bastards in this round.
3 comments:
Jim, this is one of those blog posts that should be required reading by every human in the country capable of actually reading, and also read to those who cannot.
While shedding an invaluable light on just how preposterous the whole process is - I'm sure the state of the economy wasn't a consideration back when Clemens' summons was first issued - it also highlights what a sad state of affairs it is when millions can be spent to inject the huge .gov nose into private business while threatening an end to those precious checks to Grannie.
Hell, I still find it an extraordinary and unforgivable crime that dollar figures merely in the millions can be so easily trivialized at all. Damn each and every inch of D.C.
tweaker
w/v: expla. Funny. Just like politics. Just the very beginning of explanation, only to leave out enough to render the whole thing useless.
Damn, I'm cranky this morning.
Excellent post, Jim. The first congressional hearing I remember, probably the first on I paid any attention, was McCarthy and his road show. All since then have upheld the traditions of the theater of the absurd. They only serve as podia for blowhards, and result in very few questions. As far as lying to Congress, I am reminded of a Richard Harris question in "The Unforgiven"--"Why not"?. JAGSC
Thank you, Gentlemen. This crap of quasi-judicial meddling by the legislative branch has always struck me as one of the more dangerous processes we let them get away with.
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