Interesting comments today from Representative Henry Waxman (D) about Wednesday’s hearings:
“I think Clemens and McNamee both came out quite sullied, and I didn’t think it was a hearing that needed to be held in order to get the facts out about the Mitchell report,” Waxman said.
“I’m sorry we had the hearing. I regret that we had the hearing. And the only reason we had the hearing was because Roger Clemens and his lawyers insisted on it.”
“Roger Clemens’s lawyers told us he wanted the opportunity to make his case in public,” Waxman said. “He had his opportunity.” Now, Waxman added, 90 percent of the people being asked their opinion of the hearing were stating that they did not believe Clemens.
Clemens’s Lawyer, Rusty Hardin, had a different view:
“He is the one who created this circus in the first place,” Hardin said of Waxman, contending that Clemens and his lawyers had asked several weeks ago for the hearing to be called off, only to be rebuffed by Waxman’s staff.
“We didn’t think any good would come out of having a food fight with the accuser,” Hardin said in reference to McNamee. But once the depositions were taken last week, he said, the Clemens side felt it had no choice but to proceed, fearing that the committee would use the depositions to produce a hostile written report. “We wanted this out in the open,” Hardin said.
This much is clear for anyone who watched the proceedings - not one person involved in the hearings, whether it be McNamee, Clemens, the lawyers, that Mitchell Report guy or the men and woman of Congress came away a winner. It was a fiasco from the beginning.