// posted June 01, 2006 by Lou Schuler

You may have heard that the federal government has subpoenaed the two San Francisco Chronicle reporters who broke the story about Barry Bonds' grand-jury testimony. That and other scoops led them to write Game of Shadows, a truly terrific book about Bonds, BALCO, and the culture of doping in modern sports.

The government wants the reporters to tell them who leaked the grand-jury transcripts, and the Chronicle is fighting back:

The San Francisco Chronicle filed a legal motion today to quash federal subpoenas that call on two reporters to identify the source of grand jury testimony they reported in articles about the use of performance-enhancing drugs by Barry Bonds and other star athletes.


If the law was bent or broken by the leaking of the testimony, the motion argues, that damage was more than balanced by the benefits of the articles, which revealed the biggest sports scandal in a generation and led to action by Congress and Major League Baseball.


The reporters, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, could face jail if they refuse to identify their source or sources.


In the motion to quash, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the reporters' attorneys argue that legal precedent and Department of Justice policy require the court to balance free speech against law enforcement interests in deciding whether the subpoenas should stand.


The motion argues that the balance weighs heavily in the reporters' favor because of the results of their reporting and the lack of harm to the case heard by the grand jury, the investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative in Burlingame.

This is my favorite part:

The only crime that might have been committed by leaking the grand jury documents is contempt of court, or violation of a court order, said Eve Burton, general counsel for the Hearst Corp., which owns The Chronicle.


"I'm not saying violation of a protective order is not significant," she said, "but it is not a violent crime. It is not national security."


"It's extremely difficult for me to understand the logic of the government's actions. This is not the case that one would think they wanted to have a fight with the media on."

Come on, Eve, think about it: Why in the world would the Bush administration's justice department not want reporters to report the news?


The shot heard by whoever happened to be in the stadium at the time


You may have also heard that when Barry Bonds hit his 715th homer, the Giants' radio announcer's microphone went dead. Here's the official explanation:

Equipment failure and not human error or sabotage knocked out the microphone of Giants broadcaster Dave Flemming as he called Barry Bonds' 715th career home run Sunday, according to KNBR program director Lee Hammer.


After examining the equipment following Sunday's glitch, Hammer determined that a mic processor (which sends the audio signal to the engineering equipment) failed, causing Flemming's mic to go dead, just as Bonds' fourth-inning home run was leaving the ballpark.


"Ten seconds sooner and I would have been able to correct it or get Dave a different mic," said Hammer, who was subbing for producer/engineer Lee Jones on the broadcast. "It was an equipment failure at the worst possible time."


It is the exquisitely bad timing of the glitch that has spawned conspiracy theories, everything from speculation that Flemming's microphone became unplugged during the excitement to the possibility that KNBR was the victim of sabotage.

"Sabotage" would imply that someone actually cared about Bonds' homer. Personally, I see no evidence of that.


Free Lance


If this is true, then Lance Armstrong is now the only elite athlete in modern history who was widely suspected of doping but was actually innocent:

Lance Armstrong called it a "witch hunt" from the very beginning. He said a French newspaper used dubious evidence to accuse him of doping -- even charging that lab officials mishandled his samples and broke the rules.


According to a Dutch investigator's findings released Wednesday, he may have been right.


The report, commissioned late last year by the International Cycling Union, cleared the record seven-time Tour-de-France champion of allegations that he used performance-enhancing drugs during his first win in 1999.


It said tests on urine samples were conducted improperly and fell so short of scientific standards that it didn't "constitute evidence of anything."


The investigation also concluded that the French laboratory that handled the samples and the World Anti-Doping Agency "violated applicable rules on athlete confidentiality by commenting publicly on the alleged positive findings."

Notice what isn't said here. We know that the lab mishandled samples, and that whoever leaked news of Armstrong's test results broke the rules. Okay. But does that mean Armstrong wasn't doping?

"Whether the samples were positive or not, I don't know how a Dutch lawyer with no expertise came to a conclusion that one of the leading laboratories in the world messed up on the analysis. To say Armstrong is totally exonerated seems strange," Pound said.

My thoughts exactly. At best, we're back where we started, with insiders widely suspecting Armstrong of getting away with blood doping, and no evidence to back up that suspicion.

You could say the same applies to Barry Bonds (if you disregard all the circumstantial evidence that Bonds took a shitload of drugs and knew exactly what he was doing), but there's a crucial difference: People like Lance. Nobody, with the possible exception of the riders who have to compete against him, wants to think of a guy who lost a nut and survived brain cancer as a cheater. It's irrelevant.

Being well-liked isn't a life-long "get out of jail free" card. Public opinion on Mark McGwire has certainly gone 180 degrees to the left since the circumstantial evidence of his steroid use got too big to ignore.

But being a total dick like Bonds is an invitation to be suspected of anything and everything. Steroids? Guilty. Cheating on his wife, and then cheating on the girlfriend with whom he cheated on his wife? Wouldn't surprise me. Not paying taxes? Yeah, why not? Satan worship? Sure fits the profile.

Let this be a lesson to all future dopers and other rule-breakers: If you need people to believe you're innocent, don't make them want to believe you're guilty.

Seems simple enough, right?

(Thanks to Rob Duffield for the links to the Chronicle stories. Speaking of Rob, check out his account of his latest triathlon. Make sure you read to the end -- the ironies are priceless.)

Tags: sports