Enlarge imageBy Thomas Ferraro
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A spokesman for baseball pitching great Roger Clemens rejected on Thursday new claims of evidence that Clemens used performance-enhancing drugs.
"It’s bogus," Joe Householder said as Clemens’ former trainer, Brian McNamee, met behind closed doors with U.S. congressional investigators.
The New York Times quoted an attorney familiar with the matter as saying McNamee has given investigators bloody gauze pads, vials and syringes that McNamee said he used to inject Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone between 2000 and 2001.
Clemens, who earlier this week meet with congressional lawyers and again denied using steroids or human growth hormone, returned to Capitol Hill to begin what was expected to be a series of one-on-one meetings with members of the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
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The committee will hold a hearing next Wednesday on Clemens’ challenge of a report on performance-enhancing drugs requested by Major League Baseball and conducted by former Senate Democratic leader George Mitchell.
McNamee and Clemens are to testify at the hearing along with two of Clemens’ former teammates with the New York Yankees, retired second baseman Chuck Knoblauch and pitcher Andy Pettitte, who recently signed a new contract with the team.
The Mitchell report named more than 80 former and current players -- including Clemens, Pettitte and Knoblauch -- as suspected users of performance-enhancing drugs.
McNamee hopes that chemicals tests and DNA from the materials he turned over to investigators will support his claims that Clemens used performance-enhancing drugs, the New York Times quoted the unidentified lawyer as saying.
"Brian McNamee is obviously a troubled man who is obsessed with doing everything possible to destroy Roger Clemens," said Householder. "He lied to Senator Mitchell, he lied to the federal government, and now he apparently has manufactured evidence."
The stakes are high for both Clemens, McNamee and other witnesses who will testify at the hearing next week. If any of them are found to have lied to Congress, they face up to five years in prison.
Yet if Clemens is able to successfully refute the charges, he will be a shoo-in for the baseball Hall of Fame.
If he fails to do so, he may likely have trouble being enshrined in the Hall of Fame despite a 24-year during which he amassed a record of 354 wins against 184 loses as one of the greatest pitchers in the history of the game.
Baseball banned human growth hormone in 2005, but there are no effective tests for it. Baseball began testing for steroids, also banned by the game, in 2003.
(Reporting by Thomas Ferraro; editing by Philip Barbara)
