Patriots respond to Wells Report with their own context
The Patriots fight against the NFL and the Wells Report continues.
The official team Twitter account sent out a link to a website Thursday entitled “The Wells Report in Context.’’ The site documents the team’s problems with the NFL’s report on the Deflategate scandal, contending “the conclusions of the Wells Report are at best, incomplete, incorrect and lack context.’’
The site features an annotated version of the executive summary of the Wells Report made by Patriots lawyer Daniel Goldberg, a senior partner at the Boston firm Morgan Lewis. Goldberg was “present during all of the interviews of Patriots personnel conducted at Gillette Stadium,’’ according to the report’s introduction.
The full Patriots’ rebuttal, which is over 19,000 words long, can be found at wellsreportcontext.com.
In his notes, Goldberg questions the independence and impartiality of investigator Ted Wells, who defended those qualities in a conference call on Tuesday, noting Wells’s law firm’s “financial relationship’’ with the NFL. The annotations also take issue with the conclusions reached in the Wells Report regarding the measurements and testing of the Patriots game balls.
“There is no evidence that Tom Brady preferred footballs that were lower than 12.5 psi and no evidence that anyone even thought that he did,’’ the introduction to the site says. “All the extensive evidence which contradicts how the texts are interpreted by the investigators is simply dismissed as ‘not plausible.’ Inconsistencies in logic and evidence are ignored.’’
The site contends that the “jocular’’ text messages between team personnel — officials’ locker room attendant Jim McNally and assistant equipment manager John Jastremski — implicated in the Wells Report were not evidence of a calculated plot to deliberately deflate footballs. In regard to McNally referring to himself as “the deflator’’ in one text message cited in the Wells Report, the site says this was was in reference to his trying to lose weight.
“There was nothing complicated or sinister about it,’’ the site says.
Additionally, the site includes links to a scientific conclusion from Nobel Laureate Roderick MacKinnon, a professor of molecular neurobiology and biophysics at Rockerfeller University, the original letter sent to team owner Robert Kraft from NFL senior vice president David Gardi alerting him of an impending investigation dated Jan. 19, a letter from league executive vice president and general counsel Jeff Pash to Goldberg, a memo from Goldberg to Ted Wells noting the team’s “cooperation in the investigative process’’ and the entire Wells Report itself.
The Wells Report found that it was “more probable than not’’ that Patriots team personnel deliberately deflated the team’s game balls used in the AFC Championship game. It also concluded that quarterback Tom Brady “was at least generally aware’’ of those activities. The NFL announced on Monday that Brady would be suspended for the first four games of the 2015 season and that the team would be fined $1 million and docked a first-round draft pick in the 2016 NFL Draft and a fourth-round pick in the 2017 draft.
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