The Patriots have launched a website rebutting many of the claims that led to the conclusion in the Ted Wells report that the team intentionally tampered with footballs used in the AFC Championship game.
One of the reasons cited is that the Patriots refused to make Jim McNally, who was responsible for transporting the Patriots’ footballs to the field and whose text messages with equipment assistant John Jastremski figure heavily in the Wells report, available for a second interview with investigators. In their response, the Patriots argue that they did not make McNally available because Wells didn’t have reason to interview McNally again under the conditions agreed to by both sides.
In emails to Wells, Patriots counsel Daniel Goldberg writes that the sides agreed that “interviews will be arranged so that, barring unanticipated circumstances, there will not be future multiple interviews of the same person.” Wells said this week that they wanted to question McNally, who spoke to the league multiple times before being interviewed by Wells, about referring to himself as “the deflator” in a text to Jastremski, but Goldberg and the Patriots argue that was not new information. Instead, they say Wells had overlooked that text before McNally’s first interview.
Goldberg wrote to Wells that if he wants “some added information from Jim McNally, let me know what it is and I will consider the best way to get relevant information to you,” but that he was “disinclined” to ask McNally to appear for another interview because there were not the “unanticipated circumstances” referred to above.
The Patriots assert elsewhere that McNally used “the deflator” in reference to himself because he was trying to lose weight, rather than the “complicated or sinister” assumptions made by Wells and company.