Tom Brady’s Agent Rips Wells Report

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s agent, Don Yee, bitterly lashed out at the NFL and the Wells Report that insinuated that Brady lied about DeflateGate.

The report states, “We also have concluded that it is more probable than not that Tom Brady was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities of [the locker room attendants] involving the release of air from Patriots game balls.”

Yee fired back a statement in which he said that the Wells report deliberately omitted key parts of Brady’s testimony, asserting, “Its omission of key facts and lines of inquiry suggest the investigators reached a conclusion first, and then determined so-called facts later.” He ripped the league for its close association with the law firm employing Wells: “The league is a significant client of the investigators’ law firm; it appears to be a rich source of billings and media exposure based on content in the law firm’s website. This was not an independent investigation and the contents of the report bear that out – all one has to do is read closely and critically, as opposed to simply reading headlines.”

Yee pointed out that Ted Wells used attorneys’ time-honored technique of burying the holes in his argument in the footnotes where they can be ignored by reporters who don’t read the fine print. But the meat of Yee’s argument revolved around the report’s omission of Brady’s testimony. As Yee wrote:

I have verbatim notes of the interview. Tom made himself available for nearly an entire day and patiently answered every question. It was clear to me the investigators had limited understanding of professional football. For reasons unknown, the Wells report omitted nearly all of Tom’s testimony, most of which was critical because it would have provided this report with the context that it lacks. Mr. Wells promised back in January to share the results of this investigation publicly, so why not follow through and make public all of the information gathered and let the public draw its own conclusions? This report contains significant and tragic flaws, and it is common knowledge in the legal industry that reports like this generally are written for the benefit of the purchaser.

Wells did admit in his report that there was no evidence of Patriots owner Robert Kraft and coach Bill Belichick being involved in Deflategate. Kraft bluntly responded to the report, “To say we are disappointed in its findings, which do not include any incontrovertible or hard evidence of deliberate deflation of footballs at the AFC Championship game, would be a gross understatement.”

Brady denied any wrongdoing in the affair back in January, saying, “I didn’t alter the ball in any way. I have no knowledge of wrongdoing.”

The Wells report notes that Brady told Belichick that he had no knowledge of anyone tampering with the footballs, but Brady and John Jastremski, an equipment assistant for the Patriots who allegedly deflated the footballs with Jim McNally, the Officials Locker Room attendant for the Patriots, exchanged a flurry of texts and phone calls after the AFC Championship Game.