Cowboys owner Jerry Jones hadn’t said much about the Congressional investigation of the Commanders. On Friday, Jones said plenty.
“First of all, I hope our fans see how politically biased this report is,” Jones said during his weekly Friday appearance on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas. “This report doesn’t even come out if the Republicans were in Congress.”
He’s right, but that outcome would also be politically biased.
“It’s that stupid,” Jones added. “My point is there is biasness all the way through. There are stories behind the stories. The facts are that Mr. Snyder’s minority partners really went out a long way to try and make him sell. He ended up buying them out. But a lot of this is that.”
In other words, Jones believes that the three minority partners (including FedEx founder Fred Smith) instigated all of this to hurt Snyder. The truth, however, is that they had cashed out months before Congress started its investigation.
“And a lot of the testimony I was involved first hand,” Jones said. “I was among the handful of owners that looked at all of the transcripts. That looked at all of the messages. That looked at all of the data. This attorney is trying to -- is on a campaign, the woman attorney, to stop having settlements. When you have workplace settlements that’s another issue. But that’s a part of why this has the front that it has.”
It’s unclear which attorney Jones is specifically referring to. It is clear that Jones has a bias in favor of being able to write a check to make a workplace problem go away. That’s what he did in 2015 with the voyeurism scandal that remained under wraps until earlier this year -- and that inexplicably has been ignored, by pretty much everyone.
The simple truth is that the Oversight Committee didn’t discover anything we didn’t already know. There was confirmation of various reports that had surfaced, but there was nothing that close observers didn’t already know.
Specifically, the Commanders had a toxic and hostile workplace for years. Snyder was ultimately responsible for it. Snyder was directly accused by at least two employees of misconduct. Former team executive Bruce Allen was involved in email exchanges with Jon Gruden that were not appropriate, for a variety of reasons. The league buried the results of the Beth Wilkinson investigation.
The Committee investigation brought extra attention to the situation. That’s something the NFL doesn’t want, whether as it relates to the Commanders or the Cowboys or any other NFL team.
