Ted Wells might have said a little too much in responding to the New England Patriots’ response to his report.
OK, let us explain.
Wells’ 243-page report incriminated Patriots locker room attendant Jim McNally, among others, in a plot to deflate footballs before the AFC Championship Game. Among the evidence he used was a text message from McNally in which he referred to himself as “the deflator.”
The Patriots had a rather interesting rebuttal to this claim Thursday, and according to Bart Hubbuch of the New York Post, Wells didn’t take it too seriously.
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Yet Wells’ interpretation of McNally’s texts appears problematic as well. In a conversation with Hubbuch, the high-powered attorney admitted he didn’t connect the dots between McNally’s text and the investigation during his first interview with the Patriots employee.
[tweet https://twitter.com/BartHubbuch/status/599004289378480128 align=’center’]
[tweet https://twitter.com/BartHubbuch/status/599004568379351040 align=’center’]
So what’s the issue here? On page 87 of his own report, Wells accuses the Patriots of not cooperating after referencing a text sent by McNally in November 2014.
“We planned to discuss this message with McNally during our requested follow-up interview,” he writes. “As noted above, we were unable to do so because counsel for the Patriots refused to make McNally available.”
That statement and Wells’ comments to Hubbuch don’t match up. Wells claimed he only looked at McNally’s texts from the 2014 season, but now admits he had a McNally text from spring 2014. Either Wells is lying about not noticing the spring 2014 text and used it to try to get another interview with McNally, or he lied in the initial report about his reasoning for a follow-up interview.
Issues of credibility have abounded in the Deflategate case so far, and Wells apparently is the latest to join the party.
Thumbnail photo via Twitter/@SNFonNBC
