Tag: House Committee on Oversight and Reform

Big news for the Commanders’ stadium hopes in D.C.

A good start for the Commanders in their quest to build a new stadium in Washington, D.C, but they still have a long way to go.

Finally, there is some positive news regarding the Washington Commanders concerning the United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

On Wednesday, the Committee approved a bill that would extend the lease of RFK Stadium with the federal government to 99 years. The federal government owns the RFK site, and the current lease ends in 2036.

The Committee, with bipartisan support, voted 31-9 to move the bill forward, where the next step will be a future vote on the House floor later this year. So, while this is a big step forward, there remains a long way to go.

Washington D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser was present and has been a major proponent of bringing the Commanders back to the District, where the team played its home games until FedEx Field opened in 1997. Since Daniel Snyder sold the team, Bowser has been outspoken about creating a mixed-use development in Washington that would create jobs and housing with the Commanders stadium as an anchor.

Bowser faces opposition, who believe taxpayer dollars should not be used to build a professional sports stadium.

Bowser released a statement after the hearing.

Not only does Washington want the Commanders, but so do Virginia and Maryland — where FedEx Field is located. Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin each attended training camp this summer in Ashburn, discussing why the Commanders should build their new stadium in their respective states.

Bruce Allen said the Commanders hired private investigators to follow him

Bruce Allen said the Commanders hired private investigators to follow him in 2021.

The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform released its final report on the investigation into the Washington Commanders and owner Daniel Snyder.

The report alleges Snyder “permitted and participated” in the team’s toxic workplace culture and intimidated witnesses from participating in the investigation. You can find the full report here.

There were several interesting bits of news to come from Thursday, many of which centered around former team president Bruce Allen. Allen testified in front of the committee in September and was initially shocked his private emails from when he worked for Washington were leaked to the Wall Street Journal.

The leaked emails eventually led to Jon Gruden’s resignation as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. When Allen called NFL counsel Lisa Friel to complain about the leak, he was informed by Friel that the leak came from the Commanders’ side.

“We didn’t do it at the league office,” Friel told Allen, per Allen. “It came out of their side.”

Another interesting aspect of Allen’s testimony was that he was surveilled last year.

How did he know he was under surveillance?

“My wife was concerned,” Allen’s deposition read. “We live in a—we had just moved into a home. And the street’s a real narrow street. It’s hard [for] two cars even to go by. And she saw a car out there the night before, and then in the morning it was there, and it’s running, the engine’s running. And I had made some coffee. And I went out. And the gentleman stepped out of the car, and he said, “Hi, Mr. Allen.” I said, “Well, that’s interesting. You need a cup of coffee? Are you here to serve me with a subpoena or something?” He said, “No, we’re just here to follow you,” and something like “document your actions.”

When was Allen under surveillance?

“Yes. It was in around—well, I don’t know when it started,” Allen said. “I met him I think in— right around beginning of March. But I don’t know when it started, and I don’t know if it stopped.”

How did Allen know it was the Commanders who were following him?

“The one who followed me told me the Washington Football Team hired him,” Allen said.

Since the Washington Post’s July 2020 story, Snyder has deflected blame on Allen for the organization’s toxic workplace culture, even in instances before Allen worked for the organization.

Snyder admitted in his deposition he hired private investigators but didn’t remember the specifics. Here’s an excerpt of the report:

For example, although Mr. Snyder admitted to using private investigators, he testified that he was “unaware” whom his investigators approached and did not “remember” having conversations with his counsel about the individuals targeted. admitted to using private investigators, he testified that he was “unaware” whom his investigators approached and did not “remember” having conversations with his counsel about the individuals targeted. Among the individuals that Mr. Snyder claimed he could not recall as targets of the private investigators were: Brad Baker, who had publicly alleged that Team executives ordered the creation of lewd cheerleader videos at Mr. claimed he could not recall as targets of the private investigators were: Brad Baker, who had publicly alleged that Team executives ordered the creation of lewd cheerleader videos at Mr. Snyder’s direction; John Moag, an investment banker who had represented the Commanders former minority owners in their efforts to sell their stake in the Team and who Mr. Snyder accused of leaking disparaging information about him; and Mr. Allen, whom Mr. Snyder publicly blamed for the Commanders’ toxic work environment.

Snyder fired Allen in December 2019, which led to the hiring of current head coach Ron Rivera. Snyder hired the current team president, Jason Wright, in August 2020.

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Bruce Allen testifies that league office blamed Commanders for leaking Jon Gruden emails

Bruce Allen vs. Dan Snyder continues.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform released a 79-page report Thursday alleging that Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder “permitted and participated” in the organization’s toxic workplace culture.

Something else of note in the report concerned the fall of former Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden. Gruden resigned in Oct. 2021 after multiple email exchanges between him and former Washington team president Bruce Allen were revealed in a Wall Street Journal story contained racist, misogynistic, and homophobic slurs.

There has long been a debate about who leaked the emails. Snyder has been accused but his wife, and co-owner Tanya Snyder, strongly denied leaking the emails.

According to Allen, in his testimony to the House Committee, an NFL executive told him that the Commanders were responsible for leaking the emails. If true, the goal of Washington would have been to make Allen look bad, whom Snyder had fired in Dec. 2019.

Here’s an excerpt from the report.

According to public court records, in April 2021, Mr. Snyder filed a petition in federal court seeking to compel documents and information from Mr. Allen.136 Around the same time, Mr. Snyder and his lawyers collected more than 400,000 emails from Mr. Allen’s Commanders email account and used some of them in Mr. Snyder’s public court filings. Mr. Snyder also used the information collected on Mr. Allen to present “evidence” to the NFL that Mr. Allen was responsible for the Commanders’ toxic work culture.

By June 2021, Mr. Snyder one went step further: he identified for the NFL “specific inappropriate Bruce Allen emails” to bolster his claims that Mr. Allen was to blame for the toxic workplace culture.139 Public reports indicate that, although the NFL found Mr. Allen’s emails troubling, it determined that they were “outside the scope of the original probe of the Washington Football Team.

In October, Allen had learned that many of the emails obtained by Snyder from his Washington email address had been leaked to the Wall Street Journal.

From there, Allen called NFL counsel Lisa Friel to complain. Friel then allegedly told Allen the Commanders were responsible for the leak.

“We didn’t do it at the league office,” Friel reportedly said. “It came out of their side.”

Allen worked for Washington from Dec. 2009 to Dec. 2019.

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Report says Daniel Snyder ‘permitted and participated’ in Washington’s toxic workplace culture

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform released a 79-page report alleging that Snyder

According to the final report released Thursday from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder “permitted and participated” in the team’s toxic workplace culture.

The Oversight Committee began its investigation in Oct. 2021 by conducting numerous interviews, depositions and a roundtable with former team employees. A hearing with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was held over the summer, where he testified.

According to the report, Snyder testified before the committee on July 28 and gave testimony “that was often evasive or misleading.”

“We saw efforts that we have never seen before, at least I haven’t,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-New York, per Tisha Thompson of ESPN. “The NFL knew about it, and they took no responsibility.”

In discussing Beth Wilkinson’s report, Maloney said the following:

“Then they turn around and fix it so she can’t talk,” Maloney said, referring to Wilkinson. “Her report is never going to be made public, yet she was supposed to be hired to address it. The hypocrisy. The coordinated effort to hide what they acknowledged.”

The report also alleges that “dozens of employees at the Commanders were harmed by a toxic work culture for more than two decades. The Team’s owner permitted and participated in this troubling conduct.”

The Commanders, through attorneys John Brownlee and  Stuart Nash, offered the following statement after the report’s release:

These Congressional investigators demonstrated, almost immediately, that they were not interested in the truth, and were only interested in chasing headlines by pursuing one side of the story.  Today’s report is the predictable culmination of that one-sided approach.

There are no new revelations here.  The Committee persists in criticizing Mr. Snyder for declining to voluntarily appear at the Committee’s hearing last spring, notwithstanding Mr. Snyder’s agreement to sit, at a date chosen by the Committee, for an unprecedented 11-hours of questioning under oath.  The only two members of Congress who witnessed any part of that deposition, one Democrat and one Republican, both made public statements in the wake of the deposition characterizing Mr. Snyder’s answers as truthful, cooperative, and candid.  As is typical of the Committee, they have refused, despite our repeated requests to release the full transcript of Mr. Snyder’s deposition.

The Committee suggests that Mr. Snyder prevented witnesses from coming forward yet does not identify a single witness who did not come forward or who suffered a single adverse consequence for having done so.

And, ironically for an “investigative” body, supposedly engaged in an “investigation,” the investigators actually criticize the team and Mr. Snyder for providing evidence to the Committee — such as e-mails former team employees sent from their workplace accounts — that reveal the actual causes of the formerly dysfunctional workplace environment at the team.

Today’s report does not advance public knowledge of the Washington Commanders workplace in any way.  The team is proud of the progress it has made in recent years in establishing a welcoming and inclusive workplace, and it looks forward to future success, both on and off the field.

Last month, it was revealed that Snyder hired Bank of America Securities to look into possible transactions with the franchise, which Snyder and his wife, Tanya, acknowledged.

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Report: U.S. attorney’s office investigating Commanders regarding alleged financial improprieties

More trouble for Daniel Snyder?

The hits keep on coming for the Washington Commanders and owner Daniel Snyder. Don Van Natta Jr. of ESPN reported that the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia had opened a criminal investigation into the NFL franchise regarding alleged financial improprieties.

Van Natta cites two sources familiar with the matter.

The report says the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission and multiple attorney generals in April regarding “alleged deceptive business practices.”

NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy had the following to say: “We will decline comment.”

Attorney John Brownlee of Holland & Knight, who represents the Commanders, offered the following statement to ESPN:

“It is not surprising that ESPN is publishing more falsehoods based solely on anonymous sources — given today’s announcement,” the statement read. “We are confident that, after these agencies have had a chance to review the documents and complete their work, they will come to the same conclusion as the team’s internal review — that these allegations are simply untrue.”

The announcement Brownlee is seemingly referencing is the Forbes report that Snyder had hired Bank of America to investigate a potential franchise sale.

The U.S. attorney’s office and the FTC declined to comment to ESPN.

Mary Jo White is currently investigating allegations against Snyder and Washington’s formerly toxic workplace culture. White’s investigation is the second NFL investigation into the team.

The alleged financial improprieties initially came to light earlier this year when a former team employee came forward with allegations that the franchise had two separate financial books, “one with underreported ticket revenue that went to the NFL and the full, complete picture.”

We will continue to follow this story.

Attorneys for Daniel Snyder send letter to House Oversight Committee

Snyder’s attorneys call the House investigation “a politically inspired hatchet job.”

Fans and everyone around the NFL were shocked to see Washington Commanders Daniel Snyder at AT&T Stadium on Sunday with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

Even more shocking was Washington’s social media channels acknowledging Snyder ahead of the game while he remains under investigation by the NFL and the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

It was later revealed Snyder has been at every Washington game this season, but that was the first time he was seen down on the field.

On Wednesday night, Michael Phillips of the Richmond Times-Dispatch broke the story of Snyder’s attorneys sending a letter to the House committee questioning the fairness of the investigation, calling it “a politically inspired hatchet job.”

In the letter, Snyder’s attorneys called into credibility some of the witnesses who have testified for the committee.

On former team president Bruce Allen:

It is widely acknowledged that the single most significant step the Team took to remedy its toxic workplace was to rid itself of Mr. Allen. The fraternity-house culture that Mr. Allen instilled in the Commanders organization is the principal reason that the Commanders came under investigation in the first place. If the Committee had desired, it could have interviewed any of the current employees of the Commanders whose tenure extended back to the Allen years. Those employees would, almost universally, have identified Mr. Allen’s departure as the date that the Team culture began to turn around. Prior to Mr. Allen’s deposition, my law firm provided the Committee with a small sample of his workplace communications. That the Committee would nevertheless choose to sponsor such a witness, in full awareness of the racist, misogynistic, and homophobic beliefs he tolerated and espoused in his e-mail conversations with his friends, is truly astounding. I was informed that, when confronted with these e-mails at his deposition, Mr. Allen’s lawyer questioned their authenticity—despite the fact that these e-mails had been relied upon by the NFL in its investigation of the Team, and despite the fact that a frequent participant in these conversations, former Raiders head coach Jon Gruden, immediately resigned when even a tiny sample of them was leaked to the media.

The letter states that Allen, Jason Friedman, Melanie Coburn and David Pauken are “most embittered by their enforced separation from the Team—the same people who were responsible for the toxic workplace culture—and has given them a platform to settle old scores.”

The letter was addressed to Carolyn Maloney, the chairwoman of the House committee, and was written by Tom Davis,  former House committee chairman from 2003-2007. Davis is now a partner at Holland & Knight, the law firm that represents the team.

The letter talks of Washington’s new culture, led by team president Jason Wright, which has been praised around the NFL. It notes how no one from the House committee chose to interview any current employee concerning the complete turnaround of the franchise’s workplace culture.

There is much more included in the letter, including multiple exhibits the team shared in defense of Snyder and the team.

We’ll continue to follow this story.

Former Washington team president Bruce Allen testifies 10 hours before House committee

Bruce Allen testified for 10 hours before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform Tuesday.

Former Washington team president Bruce Allen testified virtually before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform for 10 hours on Tuesday. Allen’s testimony began around 11:30 a.m. ET and ended around 9:30 p.m., according to the Washington Post.

Allen’s testimony is the latest in the House committee’s investigation into the NFL team’s toxic workplace culture. Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder gave a voluntary deposition under oath in July. Allen’s testimony came after he was subpoenaed.

Allen was Washington’s team president for 10 years until he was fired in December 2019. Allen presided over Washington’s day-to-day activities for a decade and came under scrutiny last fall when some of his over 600,000 emails from his time in Washington were released.

Allen’s emails to former Raiders coach Jon Gruden while he worked at ESPN led to the latter’s resignation as head coach last October. Other Allen emails were released, including to the NFL’s top lawyer, Jeff Pash.

The NFL’s investigation into the organization is the second one led by the league. Beth Wilkinson’s original investigation, which did not include a written report, lasted close to a year. After more allegations surfaced against Snyder this year, the NFL appointed Mary Jo White to lead the new investigation.

Snyder himself has faced troubling accusations, which he has consistently denied, while the team was accused by a former employee of financial improprieties, another claim the they strongly denied.

The House committee released the following statement regarding Allen’s testimony via the Washington Post:

“The Committee is continuing to investigate the decades-long workplace misconduct at the Washington Commanders and the NFL’s failure to address it,” the statement said. “Mr. Allen served in senior roles under team owner Dan Snyder for many years, so his testimony is important for the Committee to fully understand these serious issues and advance reforms to protect workers in the future.”