New findings demolish Freeh Report,Freeh himself,the NCAA, news media and Penn St. Board of Trustees.

 

 A review of the Freeh Report by a distinguished panel of investigators which includes a former U.S. Attorney General has demolished the Freeh Report along with Freeh's integrity,even calling into question his motives,  and proved beyond any doubt what should have been obvious from the beginning --  that the Freeh Report was a biased hatchet job with an agenda,  filled with smears, unsubstantiated conclusions designed intentionally to smear,and did not at any time present even a shred of actual proof to back up any of its conclusions. It was in not in any way the independent and honest investigation it pretended to be.

 

This is going to be a hard pill to swallow and cause a lot of embarrassment, humiliation, heartburn and worse for a lot of people including 99% of the news media, the NCAA and of course the Board of Trustees at Penn State who accepted, perhaps swallowed is the right word,  Freeh's report so it should be expected that there are going to be some reactions, probably first from the news media, that will attempt to cast aspersions on this report and its findings which, unfortunately for any naysayers,  is bullet proof in it's conclusions.

 

Some may attempt to dismiss it using the fact that the Paterno family commissioned the report, and therefore it is somehow biased but that will never fly. First it would ignore the fact that the Freeh Report itself was bought and paid for by the Board of Trustees, who clearly had a hidden agenda, especially after their knee jerk firing of Paterno before any facts were in, not to mention that they had closed down a press conference Paterno had called to tell all he knew, and Freeh was only too happy to accept the $6 million fee and be the hit man he was hired to be.

 The other unassailable fact is the difference in the integrity, the backgrounds and experience of the people who reviewed and issued the report for the Paterno family who, unlike Freeh who was one of the most unscrupulous and sinister characters in the history of law enforcement, have impeccable credendtials and reputations.  Dick Thornburgh is a former Attorney General of the United States during Reagan's presidency, Jim Clemente a career FBI agent, profiler and former prosecutor whose entire career and expertise is in the area of child sexual abuse, and Dr. Fred Berlin, a renown physician and expert on sexual disorders at Johns Hopkins University hospital.

 

The report issued by Thornberg,FBI agent and former prosecutor Jim Clemente and Dr. Fred Berlin (click the link for the report)  tears the Freeh Report to shreds from the ground up not only destroying it on factual grounds but destroying Freeh's motives and integrity and proves it to be the  incompetent, inadequate  hatchet job and dishonest mess that it is, pointing out the same things that were pointed out here more than a year ago when the story first broke and the media first started to railroad Paterno based on inaccuracies, unvarnished lies, distortions and self-serving fabrications that were as false today as they were then.  Nevertheless the media and others, like lemmings simply swallowed what Freeh fed them when he issued his report in July since it supported (probably intentionally) their own factually inadequate and dishonest narrative, and they swallowed it for self serving purposes not the least of which was money and the opportunity to try and elevate themselves as the moralists they aren't but will pretend to be when given the opportunity.

The Freeh Report itself, when it first came out, was clearly and intentionally dishonest for anyone who read it and didnt have an agenda, and was taken apart in this space back in July of 2011. Every dishonest aspect of the Freeh Report exposed here was re-enforced by the review by Thornburgh et al.
 

The report was also, as characterized by the Paterno family lawyer,  a shot across to the bow to the NCAA, the Board of Trustees and Freeh himself since there were suggestions during an interview with Bob Ley on ESPN with Paterno's attorney as well as with Thornberg and Clemente, that unless something is undone, there could be massive law suits which could force the NCAA, the Board of Trustees and Freeh himself  into a court room.
 

Not unsurprisingly, Freeh issued a statement that did not say, "okay you nailed me, I was completely dishonest and the report is the biased hatchet job it was supposed to be,  paid for by John Surma and others on the Board of Trustees for reasons they will have to explain. I did the best I could to pin this on Paterno and the three others and take the heat off everyone else including myself since I was the vice chairman of a huge bank, MBNA, and during my tenure from 2000-2007 as vice chairman we were Sandusky's biggest corporate sponsor at Second Mile, and even though there is evidence I must have known about the 1998 Sandusky investigation and 2001 incident with Sandusky I did nothing.  But look,  I did pretty well pulling the wool over the eyes of a lot of people by using the dishonest and biased narrative  established by the news media  and I was pretty successful in fooling as many dumb people as I did who were stupid enough to buy it".
 

No Freeh didn't say any of that but if he were honest he would have. Instead to no one's surprise  he stood by the report he was paid $6 million to produce that was supposedly an unbiased objective investigation to get to the truth of what happened but didn't think he needed to interview the two people at the epicenter, Paterno or Mike McQueary who repeatedly asked to be interviewed. He stands by his report that drew conclusions from an email in 1998 from Curley asking Schultz for an update on the investigation, writing "coach is anxious to know" that concluded without a shred of proof that "coach" was Paterno even though all the evidence showed that "coach" was actually Sandusky but Freeh  fudged it and got away with it at the time  by saying "it is believed coach is Paterno" instead of "the evidence shows 'coach' is Paterno".  Because he had no evidence to show that. The real investigators hired by the Paterno family pointed that out as well which was also pointed out here months ago.
 

The 1998 investigation is extremely important because without Paterno knowing anything about the investigation and therefore the allegations against Sandusky as Freeh tried to allege, the entire Freeh Report falls to peices since there is no motive to cover anything up and no knowledge by Paterno of the allegations against Sandusky.  Not only is there no evidence that Paterno knew, all the circumstantial evidence says he didnt. But more compelling than that, there are two people who know exactly who "coach" is. Unambiguously and with a 100% certainty. Its Curley who wrote the email and Schulz who recieved it. And the report by Thornburgh,Clemente and Berlin states clearly that even though Freeh never interviewed Curley or Schultz, Thornburgh et al did meet with Curley and Schultz' lawyers and interviewed them and they say so in the report. And though they didnt say it in so many words ( perhaps for legal reasons since both men still face a trial) it is a virtual certainty that lawyers for Curley and Schultz know who "coach" is from their clients and the fact that the report cites that their lawyers were interviewed with respect to that email, and the report emphatically states that Paterno knew nothing of the investigation, it is a certainty one can conclude they received assurances in some way from Curley and Schultz' lawyers that "coach" in that email was NOT Joe Paterno.

 

 

Don Van Natta, the only real journalist ESPN employs called the new report "damning" against Freeh. which chronicles all the dishonesty that exists in the report. Van Natta wrote, "the report raises troubling questions about the findings, motives, independence and investigative techniques of Freeh's investigators".   And damning,by extension the NCAA, the Penn State Board of Trustees , all the journalists who bought it, like CNN's spineless Roland Martin who never wrote a word in his life about child abuse even with all the painful revelations coming out against the Catholic church, but who jumped on the bandwagon vilifying Paterno, calling him a coward in a column based on the Freeh Report which was something he obviously never even read.

The real coward of course is Roland Martin. As were so many others in the media especially those writing for ESPN. In fact, even in reporting on the new Thornburgh report, ESPN cant get the facts straight and continues to "report" the false narrative they pushed from the beginning which had much to do with inflamming passions against Paterno.

In their article published yesterday they state, " In that 2001 incident, then assistant coach Mike McQueary witnessed the assault of a boy in a shower by Sandusky and told Paterno about it the next day (italics added).   We know now McQueary never witnessed any such thing. In fact it turns out he witnessed nothing at all much less an assault and testified as such at Sandusky's trial which is why Sandusky was acquitted of the count of sexual assault stemming from the incident in the Penn State shower.

So we know he never told Paterno about any assault of a boy by Sandusky in that shower. In fact he never told anyone he witnessed an assault including his own father and family friend Dr. Dranov, and never mentioned an assault of any kind except in his shaky grand jury testimony where he was asked leading questions. That he never witnessed any assault and that none took place in the Penn State shower was confirmed by "Victim 2", in an on the record pre-trial interview with Sandusky's defense lawyer where Victim 2 stated that no assault of even contact ever took place, which explains why Freeh didnt want to interview McQueary.

That anyone needed a report to point out how dishonest and factually manipulative the Freeh Report really was, is in itself damning.As was the media dishonesty that started from the very beginning which turned Paterno into a modern day Richard Jewell, another one of Freeh's smear victims back in 1996 when Freeh was FBI director and had him named as the Olympic bomber.

 

But the news media  who had a lot invested in attacking Paterno to ring up their cash registers (according to Pew Research the media made the story the number 1 story in the country for three weeks) continued to perpetuate the misrepresentation of facts and attacks for which  they had no facts and it didnt matter. Unless it was going to cost them in some way. After I pointed out in a peice here  that Sean Gregory of Time magazine had presented as fact things that were so clearly untrue about what Paterno knew back in November of 2001  that he had opened himself, Time Magazine and Time Warner up  to an open and shut case of libel, Time magazine's lawyers must have agreed because sometime after my piece was written, someone removed the  false and libelous comments Gregory tried to pass off as journalism and replaced them with sentences so reasonable and measured  compared to what was orginally written, it actually makes you laugh when you compare the two.

 

Unfortunately they didn't remember Woody Allen's line that when you tell the truth all the time you never have to remember anything because the new lines that replaced Gregory's libelous ones would have been impossible to write on November 8,2011 when the article was first written because it reasonably suggests we wait and see what facts will come out in the future to tell us what Paterno knew and told the grand jury when, by November 8,2001 when the article was first written those facts had already come out. (Note to Gregory and Time magazine's lawyers -- you can still go back and fix it).

 

The report written by Thornburgh,Clemente and Dr. Berlin not only demolishes Freeh as a dishonest hack, but it also demolishes the news media, the Board of Trustees, the NCAA and every person who blindly believed the clearly preposterous unsubstantiated nonsense Freeh presented in the hopes he would get away with it. And they did it by presenting facts and evidence collected by people whose integrity, experience and public lives are beyond reproach.

 It demolishes Freeh's central and preposterous premise, that Paterno knew of the 1998 investigation into Sandusky, did nothing, said nothing and was part of some conspiracy with three others to keep Sandusky;s activities quiet and to keep Penn State from bad publicity (even though the investigation and child protection exonerated Sanduksy at the time).

 

The report not only proves Paterno knew nothing of the investigation ( and couldn't have since as pointed out here months ago by a former inspector general who had read the report, unauthorized persons are prohibited by law from being given any information in  a case involving a sexual assault on a child and had Schultz given Paterno any information about the 1998 investigation he certainly would have been charged and prosecuted for that now -- and he isnt, a little fact that escaped Freeh  those intrepid journalists in the news media and those who don't read Woody Allen).

 

While there is no evidence that Paterno knew of the investigation, there is plenty of evidence that Freeh did as co-chairman of a bank that was Sandusky's biggest corporate sponsor. Which would give Freeh the proverbial means, motive and opportunity to fix the blame somewhere else and hopefully avoid any blame himself. And who knows what skeletons are in the closet of some members of the Board of Trustees? There have already been articles written showing that John Surma, a trustee had a vendetta against Paterno.

 

There are still going to be people who will cling to the Freeh Report at any cost and try to cast aspersions on this review of that report which debunks everything Freeh concluded,  as if Thornberg a former U.S. attorney general,  Clemente a career FBI agent and Dr. Fred Berlin a physician at Johns Hopkins would compromise their good names and a lifetime of integrity and achievement for a few bucks after the story had passed from public view.  The only people who will still support the Freeh Report will be those who will do it for their own self serving reasons. One of those is attorney Thomas Kline, a lawyer looking for a payout and who represents Victim 5 who said this in response to the new report:

(The new report and its findings)  "do not erase the shocking and striking documents which Freeh did uncover and which form an unassailable finding made by Mr. Freeh that Joe Paterno tragically had knowledge in 1998 .."

Mr. Kline is either incompetent, a liar,  or is simply out for a payday since as pointed out both here and in the Thornburgh review,  the Freeh Report produced no such proof that Joe Paterno knew a thing about the 1998 investigation, there is more proof to the contrary, and Kline's use of the word "unassailable" is a bad joke for someone whose profession is supposed to be about presenting facts. But  there is a lot of money on the line for Mr. Kline as he is representing a victim whose case and claim would be substantially damaged if Paterno didnt know anything about the 1998 investigation, and that is apparent in the way Kline factually misrepresents the truth, when in fact the findings made by Freeh are not only quite assailable they were assailed completely and effectively by former Attorney General Thornberg, FBI agent Clemente and Dr. Berlin and seemingly confirmed by lawyers for Curley and Schultz.

This report debunking the Freeh Report could be the opening of a Pandora's Box for Freeh, the Board of Trustees, and the NCAA. It will force all of them to answer questions that need to be asked and answered. And it will happen either in the court of public opinion or in a court of law. It will also teach a lesson to those who can't or won't think for themselves,who are not nearly as smart as they think they are, not nearly as moral as they think they are and blindly believe everything they read by those who will willfully ignore the truth for their own self serving reasons.

That it took this new report to point out all the lies, distortions, and blatantly misleading and biased aspects of the Freeh Report underscores how useless the mainstream media has become and how devoid they are of any journalistic standards or ethics. From the time the first dishonest  and factually inaccurate reports by people like Sean Gregory at Time magazine and those at ESPN first started to flow, and then the response of the media the NCAA and others to the Freeh Report, the mindless and equally ignorant torch carrying mob has had their say. Now with this report which speaks for itself,  and the unquestioned integrity and professionalism of the people who produced it,  reason, facts, truth and justice will have it's say.

As for the NCAA,  their sanctions were nothing more than cheap grandstanding by Mark Emmert who behaved more like a sycophantic small town World War II burgomeister trying to curry favor with Nazis than anyone who had any respect for the truth, facts or the constitution. Emmert wanted to jump on the bandwagon and show that the NCAA "cared" and cared so much he was willing to smear and damage an innocent man and punish tens of thousands of Penn State students who were eight years old at the time Sandusky committed the crimes for which he was convicted. And Emmert did it by circumventing and violating the NCAA's own rules, procedures and guidelines.

Freeh issued a statement that he stands by his report. He has no choice. What matters now is who will stand by Freeh.