Years after the Spygate scandal, a question lingers: Who dangled campaign cash if US Senator Arlen Specter dropped his investigation of the Patriots?
It was Donald Trump, Specter’s son and ghostwriter now say.
My latest for ESPN, with @SethWickersham: https://t.co/8vDu83Lthe
— Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) May 26, 2021
Verily, TFG is drawn to illegality like flies are drawn to Mike Pence. After reading this, I’m half convinced the missing Imperial Eagle from the Gardner Museum heist is currently decorating a lamp at Mar-A-Lago. (The really valuable pieces would’ve been shared out between Putin and his favorite oligarchs.)
IN THE SPRING of 2008, the NFL was in crisis. A hard-charging United States senator from Pennsylvania named Arlen Specter had launched an investigation into the Spygate scandal. He tried to determine how many games the New England Patriots’ illegal videotaping operation of opposing coaches’ signals had helped the team win and learn why the NFL, under the orders of commissioner Roger Goodell, had destroyed all evidence of the cheating. By May, Specter — a former Philadelphia district attorney and a lifelong Eagles fan — was so angry at the “stonewalling” of his inquiry by the league and the Patriots that he called for an independent investigator, similar to the Mitchell investigation of steroid use in professional baseball. League executives and coaches might be forced to testify under oath. The prospect sent the league, and its new commissioner, into panic. “If it ever got to an investigation,” Goodell said at one point, “it would be terrible for the league.”
The NFL tried to combat the Specter inquiry with public statements from teams that were the primary victims of New England’s spying saying the league had done its due diligence. It wasn’t working.
But there was one man, a mutual friend of Specter and Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who believed that he could make the investigation go away. He was a famous businessman and reality television star who routinely threw money at politicians to try to curry favor, whether it worked or not. He had been a generous political patron of Specter’s for two decades.
One day in early 2008, Specter had dinner with the man in Palm Beach at his palatial club, not far from Kraft’s Florida home. A phone call followed. The friend offered Specter what the senator felt was tantamount to a bribe: “If you laid off the Patriots, there’d be a lot of money in Palm Beach.”…
MF never gonna get acquitted by a New York jury now https://t.co/4MxhffC6Vo
— Pfizedd (@Zeddary) May 26, 2021
Trump tried to end Spygate probe of New England Patriots by offering bribe, late senator’s son says https://t.co/FKiLpa5ffd
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 27, 2021
mrmoshpotato
Kremlin’s orange mobster shitstain gonna mobster shitstain.
ETA – I don’t mean for that to sound so dismissive.
NotMax
There is nothing his presence does not despoil.
Ten Bears
Yet another in a long list of good reasons to boycott commercial sportsballs.
They only “win” by cheating …
KsSteve
Notice he “dangled” and “offered” money and bribes to Specter. Knowing the TFG as we do, I’m guessing the check is still in the mail.
Mary G
@KsSteve: That was my first thought; possibilities could be: he weaseled out of actually paying the money, got it from Kraft/rich Patriot fans to pass along, or stole it from his charity. It didn’t come out of his own pocket, not one cent
PS: AL, hope you are enjoying the weekend off the Covid beat. I continue to be in awe of your work here.
opiejeanne
I don’t understand why TFG felt the need to involve himself in Spygate.
Also, did Specter take the bribe that was dangled?
briber
@opiejeanne:
He was probably fronting other people’s money. Of course he skimmed a cut for himself. Grifters gonna grift.
Anne Laurie
I’m not gonna put much research into this, but Patriots owner Bob Kraft has… had dealings with Putin. Important enough deals that Putin was in position to walk off with one of Kraft’s Superbowl rings, back in 2005.
Seems to me like TFG would be only too happy to insert himself into a situation where Bob Kraft could avoid further scrutiny, just on general principles. Kraft, the Boston media asserts, does a lot of good for the community and is ethically no more dubious than any other NFL team owner. This is not, you understand, a high ethical bar.
From reading the linked article, it doesn’t seem likely Spector actually benefited from any Palm Beach ‘campaign contributions’ that wouldn’t have flowed his way regardless. The only reason it’s a story, even a late-night sports-media story, is that it’s one more marker on TFG’s lifetime career criminality.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Pfizedd (Zeddary) via Anne Laurie @ Top:
Noooo, don’t say that! His lawyers will use it as evidence to demand a mistrial.
It won’t work, but it might tie up the courts for a few months – and in the cases of Donald Trump, every day justice is delayed is a day he’s not in a jail cell where he belongs.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
The Manhattan DA has his work cut out for him. Dump is very popular in that county, winning a whopping 12% of the vote.
Villago Delenda Est
TFG’s song, written by Graham Nash.
sab
I love the pie toggle button. There are a couple of people I pied where I always peek to see what they are up to.
Booger
So, as a non-sportsball person, can someone explain why reading the other team’s signals is cheating? Isn’t that just, you know, playing smart? I mean, they’re in plain sight and everything is taped, so it’s not like tapping their phones or reading their emails, amirite?
Wouldn’t it be dereliction of duty not to read their signals?? Or is this still some part of the myth of athletic purity?
Cluttered Mind
@Booger: It’s because there isn’t one universal signal language. You can look at the other team’s signals all you want but you won’t have any idea what they mean because they each have their own code. The Patriots were recording other team private practice sessions to decode the signals. That’s not quite like tapping phones, but it’s still quite bad. It’s more like setting up a camera across the street from a house with a keypad lock so that you can record the resident entering enough times to figure out the code to enter and steal all their stuff.
Chief Oshkosh
@Cluttered Mind: Except it’s football. Fucking Specter. There wasn’t anything else going on at the time that would warrant a Senate investigation?
Calouste
@briber: Making campaign donations with other people’s money is against the law. And people (mostly Republicans of course) have been convicted for it.
Barbara
I don’t see why Specter felt the need to involve himself in NFL cheating. Someone who would use his official power to launch an investigation because his favorite team lost is exactly the kind of person who might be corrupted by campaign contributions. I don’t root for the Pats, but the use of congressional resources for trivial pursuits is just one reason we can’t solve our most important problems.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Chief Oshkosh: arlen was still a gqper at the time, & the president was also gqp (bush-43). better to investigate spygate than the leaks in the runup to the iraq war, & crimes incountry thereafter.
Edmund Dantes
@Cluttered Mind: no they weren’t taping practices. This is bullshit and had always had been. Don’t repeat lies.
it was literally a new commish needing to exert power. Plus a bunch of other owners that wanted to knock down the new guy that was winning too much.
Literally the only rule broken was the location from which the signal was recorded. It was a molehill blown up into a mountain range.
Just Chuck
Glad we’re still on the case of cheating in professional fucking sports. Russia putting one of their assets in the oval office, not so much.
Paul M Gottlieb
Like any story about Trump, the main takeaway is that Trump is a vile asshole who smears shit on everything he touches. But let’s not overlook what a useless, preening asshole Arlen Spector was. He tried to pretend that a technical violation of an arbitrary NFL rule rose to the level of a Federal Crime just so he could get a few moments in the spotlight and bolster his standing with Eagles fans. What a useless jerk
Edmund Dantes
@Just Chuck: it’s actually kind of pertinent. It goes to the same problem of how the media frames and reports on things. It allows conspiracies to foster.
A good example is the above “they were taping practices one”. It came from a single reporter. A Boston reporter with no irony. He single sourced it from a rumor. About cameras being left out alongside everyone else’s cameras at the super boslNo one has ever actually made the claim and backed it up with actual facts. Yet it got out there in an initial rush during all the hoopla. And it gets repeated decades later as the truth.
Edmund Dantes
@Paul M Gottlieb: don’t forget Comcast was in a fight with DirecTV and the NFL at the time to try to get the Sunday Ticket package to not be exclusive to DirecTV only. Where is Comcast headquartered at that time… and who did they contribute a lot of money to… a lot of spygate was a proxy for other battles.
at the time Kraft was new money in the NFL. He was making a big name for himself. Helped push for Goodell to get hired. Helped negotiate labor peace. Was getting called the real commish. This was all part and parcel of goodell showing to the other owners that were his bosses that he could deal with someone like Kraft.
Mart
tfg strikes a blow to my heart again. .https://www.boston.com
“The Patriots quickly issued an official denial of the story. “The suggestion that the New England Patriots recorded the St. Louis Rams‘ walkthrough on the day before Super Bowl XXXVI in 2002 is absolutely false,” the Patriots declared. “Any suggestion to the contrary is untrue.””
VOR
There are only 32 NFL teams and owning a major sports team is a way to join an exclusive club. It was reported TFG bid on the Buffalo Bills in 2014 and the New England Patriots in 1988. He has probably tried to buy other teams in the past. He owned the New Jersey Generals of the USFL back in the 1980s and is widely blamed for the death of the USFL. So it is plausible TFG may have wanted to join the NFL owner’s club and saw doing a favor for an owner as a way to build support.
way2blue
Wait. I just started reading ‘The Art Forger’ for my ‘thriller’ book club. Based on the 1990 heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum! Are you in my book club? ; )