That strikes me as a bad trade, though we won't know for a couple of years.
Will Clemens testify under oath?
January 5, 2008
Congress Calls Clemens and Trainer to Testify
By DUFF WILSON
WASHINGTON - The star pitcher Roger Clemens, his former trainer Brian McNamee and three others will be asked to testify under oath before a congressional committee at a hearing Jan. 16.
In addition to Clemens, the House Oversight Committee will call Andy Pettitte, Chuck Knoblauch and Kirk Radomski, according to a person with knowledge of the hearing who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to talk about it.
Radomski is the former Mets clubhouse attendant who admitted distributing performance-enhancing drugs to dozens of major league players. His cooperation with federal authorities after his arrest formed the heart of the report by Senator George J. Mitchell into what Mitchell called baseball’s “steroids era.”
The report said that McNamee, who worked with Clemens, Pettitte and Knoblauch, said he injected Clemens with steroids.
Clemens has denied that and the congressional hearing was called to question him about the factual issues he has raised with the report. He is scheduled to appear on the CBS program “60 Minutes” on Sunday.
All five people are being asked to testify voluntarily, but the committee has not ruled out subpoenas that would force them to testify. Either way, they would be testifying under oath.
The committee had previously scheduled a hearing on Jan. 15 to take testimony about the Mitchell report from Senator Mitchell, Commissioner Bud Selig and the players association leader, Donald Fehr.
McNamee’s claims that he repeatedly injected Clemens with performance-enhancing substances were among the most jarring sections of the report compiled by Mitchell, who conducted a 20-month investigation on behalf of Major League Baseball. In the three weeks since the report’s release, Clemens and McNamee have assembled legal teams and strategies designed to propagate each side’s version of events in the court of public opinion.
Clemens previously denied McNamee’s charges in a video posted on the Internet, saying: “I did not use steroids or human growth hormone, and I’ve never done so. I did not provide Brian McNamee with any drugs to inject into my body. Brian McNamee did not inject steroids or human growth hormones into my body.”
Clemens had declined to speak on the subject further until after the broadcast of the “60 Minutes” interview, which was conducted Dec. 28 by Mike Wallace at Clemens’s home in Katy, Tex. It will be shown after CBS’s N.F.L. playoff coverage on Sunday.
CBS issued a news release on Thursday in which it said that Clemens acknowledged taking injections but denying that he used performance-enhancing drugs. According to CBS, when Wallace asked Clemens if McNamee had injected him with any drugs, Clemens responded: “Lidocaine and B12. It’s for my joints, and B12 I still take today.”
In the “60 Minutes” interview, Clemens said that McNamee’s claim that he had injected Clemens with steroids or human growth hormone was “ridiculous,” and that he had never used any banned substances.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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