Posted on 05/12/2015 12:20:14 PM PDT by Kaslin
RUSH: The Tom Brady circumstance. Let me find the place to start here with the audio sound bites. I guess that's number eight, as I set these aside. Okay, we've got four games. A lot of people are focusing on a phrase in the Ted Wells report, and I fear that they are not understanding its meaning legally. The Wells report does not say conclusively that anything happened. In fact, they made a point on page... Oh, I forget the page number, but they admit that they don't have any specific incontrovertible evidence.
It's all circumstantial.
So there's this phrase, "A greater than likelihood or probability than not" that X, Y, or Z happened. People who are not familiar with that phrase are zeroing in on it, and they are applying the same meaning to it that they would if it was the US criminal justice system. Nobody would be convicted in the criminal justice system with that as the basis forming the evidence, but this is not the criminal justice system.
There's another area I think a lot of people are right about this: The excessive aspects of the penalty: $1 million for the Patriots as a fine, and maybe even the four games to Brady, and the loss two of draft picks. There's a bunch of facets of this investigation, and I think the fact that Brady did not fully cooperate and McNally, the locker room attendant, the ball boy, did not fully cooperate. The investigators made one final request of him.
The Patriots would not produce him, and I think a lot of this penalty contains anger at that and with the league attempting to send the message that, "Look, if we're gonna investigate, you help us. If we're gonna investigate, you participate. Because what we want to do is get to the bottom of these things. If you stonewall us, then we're gonna tack on penalties for that." Others think that there are lingering aspects of Spygate.
In other words, there are some who say that the commissioner and the league regret that the penalties in Spygate were not greater. Belichick got a $500,000 fine, draft choice losses or whatever, and some in the sportswriter community are saying the league knows that they didn't go far enough on Spygate, and so this is making up for that. Now, that's a stretch, if you ask me, combining two separate and distinct investigations, even though the same theme may be running through both of them (i.e., cheating).
But there's a lot of rumors. You know, people also curious. "If Sean Payton got a full year as coach of the New Orleans Saints for not knowing about the bounty program in his locker room, well, then how did Belichick escape any penalty here for not knowing about Deflategate?" You want to hear the scuttle about the rumor for that? The scuttlebutt rumor for that is that the reason the NFL destroyed all the videotapes that the Patriots produced after Spygate was because the tapes and Belichick demonstrated to the league:
"Hey, it's not just us doing this stuff. There's all kinds of teams in this league doing all kinds of illegal stuff. And if you come after me, I'm gonna blow the whistle on everybody instead of just taking this." That's what Belichick is rumored to have said to the league after the Spygate penalties. So the theory is they leave him alone here so that he doesn't launch. I don't think that plays because this is enough to make him launch anyway.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This is Jim Gray, a well-known sports journalist, on CBS This Morning, and he's talking with Norah O'Donnell, well-known football expert at CBS This Morning. She said, "Okay, I read through Troy Vincent's letter to the Patriots. He points out that it's significant that none of the key witnesses -- Mr. Brady, Mr. Jastremski and Mr. McNally -- were not fully candid during the investigation. If they didn't have anything to hide, why do you think they didn't cooperate with the NFL? I mean, this is the organization that they're a part of."
GRAY: There was no jurisdiction here. There was no civil suit. There was no deposition. There was no criminal activity. So does that just mean that any employer, at anytime, because they're having an investigation, can now demand your cell phone? I mean, Tom and his wife are major superstars. She's a model, the top model in the world. Do you really want somebody going through your cell phone and sifting through it, no matter what the circumstances are? I don't think that's the standard that any American wants for their employer to be able to do.
RUSH: Central question here. It is a central question. Now, the usual constitutional rights to privacy do not present here. There's nothing here that the government's involved in doing and that Brady is protected from by virtue of the Fourth Amendment or anything else in the Constitution. There is a collective bargaining agreement between the players and the league, and the rules are spelled out. The rules for the employees are spelled out in the collective bargaining agreement. I don't know what they are in a circumstance like this.
As someone once said of the Clinton Administration:
I’ve never seen a more guilty-looking bunch in my whole life!...............
Who cares? This isn’t newsworthy. Too much airtime spent on this.
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