As Commanders owner Daniel Snyder continues to not be served a subpoena for testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight & Reform, he has more than a yacht floating in international waters to potentially insulate him from a process server. He’s also got a small army of lawyers.
Bloomberg.com has taken a careful look at the legal team that is helping Snyder fend off his reckoning. The latest addition is Karen Patton Seymour. She’s the former legal chief at Goldman Sachs. She returned to the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell in 2021.
The Reed Smith firm also have four lawyers on the case, per Bloomberg.
Currently hovering over the entire situation is whether and when Snyder will appear for a deposition before the Oversight Committee. A spokesperson reiterated to Bloomberg.com that Snyder “has not refused to appear” and he “looks forward to fining a path forward.”
For now, that path could be to find a way to run out the clock until the Republicans re-take the House of Representatives in November, since that would end the investigation of the Commanders as of January 1. But that’s a long time to give the finger to the Oversight Committee.
That’s really what he’s doing. And the league seems to be fine with it.
Think about that one. A team owner is, per a Committee statement issued last week, defying efforts to serve him with a subpoena. (He says he hasn’t refused to testify; the Committee says he’s refused to accept the subpoena to testify.) The NFL shrugs at this behavior. Or maybe it’s not even a shrug. The NFL just completely ignores it.
It points to a fair conclusion that the league office is afraid of Snyder. It’s afraid to take him on in court. It’s afraid of what else could be leaked from the trove of emails that took down Jon Gruden. It’s afraid of engaging with a guy who quite possibly will fight dirty and relentlessly and expose any and all dirty laundry of which he’s aware.
So they just ignore him. And, for the most part, the fans and media are ignoring the fact that the NFL has opted to stick its Shield in the sand over Snyder, because the league quite possibly fears what Snyder will do to them if they try to do anything to him.