Legal News

Rocket?s Testimony Referred to DOJ; Hardin Conflicted?

By Dan Slater

Rocket Referred, McNamee Spared: Two weeks after Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee appeared before Congress to testify about Clemens’ alleged use of human growth hormone, it seems the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has drafted a letter to the DOJ requesting a criminal investigation into whether Clemens perjured himself at the Feb. 13 testimony. McNamee, who claims that he injected the Rocket with steroids between 1998 and 2001, has not been referred, reports the NYT.

Since, during testimonies of Clemens and McNamee, the Republicans on the committee largely attacked McNamee, with the Democrats mostly going after Clemens, the lone referral of Clemens to the DOJ may indicate that the Democratic majority, led by Henry Waxman (Ca.), prevailed over Republican reservations about the truthfulness of McNamee’s statements in the Mitchell report.

Hardin’s Conflict: In related news, one of McNamee’s lawyers, Richard Emery, told the Times that McNamee’s camp would file a motion next Tuesday to disqualify Clemens’s lead lawyer, Rusty Hardin (pictured), who’s been described as “slicker ‘n deer guts on a doorknob.” They argue that, since Hardin represented former Clemens teammate Andy Pettitte for several days before the Mitchell report was released in December, Hardin cannot now represent Clemens. (Pettitte has admitted to receiving HGH injections from McNamee and has testified that Clemens told him about his use of HGH.)

“A lawyer cannot be in the position of attacking a former client on behalf of a current client who is contradicted by the former client,” Emery said. “He put himself in a position of an ethical conflict by representing Clemens and Pettitte and now they contradict one another.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 26, 2008 (boomark / email).