Legal News

Clemens Beefs Up Legal Team With Lanny Breuer

By Peter Lattman

We wish we could wax on this morning about the NFC Championship (Go Big Blue!) or the Australian Open (Go Federer!), but unfortunately this gig leaves us stuck writing about the intersection of sports and law. And since neither the Giants nor Roger the Great have any significant legal issues, as far as we know, let’s turn to The Rocket, who at this point probably wishes he had gone to law school.

Clemens has beefed up his legal team with the hiring of Covington & Burling’s Lanny Breuer, a consummate Beltway insider presumably hired to help his client navigate his way around the halls of Congress, where he’s now the subject of an investigation relating to alleged steroid use. Breuer, as legal junkies will surely recall, represented President Clinton during his impeachment hearings. Here’s the NYT story.

In an email to the Times Thursday night, Breuer wrote, “I’m honored to be joining Rusty Hardin in representing one of the greatest pitchers and athletes in history.” Hardin called Breuer his “local counsel” in Washington.

And Law Blog Moustache Society member Richard Emery, the lawyer for Clemens’s trainer, Brian McNamee, who has accused the pitcher of taking steroids, spoke to the Times and made a not so thinly veiled swipe at Hardin. “We welcome a rational voice entering the case on behalf of Clemens, and I would expect a marked and clear change in strategy quickly in order to protect his client from the obvious pitfalls of lying under oath or to federal officials.”

Breuer (Columbia, Columbia Law), who sports an aggressive pair of eyeframes, spent a half-decade as an ADA in Manhattan in the 1980s and then made headline’s as Clinton’s special counsel from 1997 to 1999. The Times interviewed another bespectacled Beltway Insider named Lanny about Breuer. Said Lanny Davis: “I can’t think of a better lawyer in Washington to represent Mr. Clemens or anybody that needs help in the Congress or in the public arena than Lanny Breuer.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 18, 2008 (boomark / email).