After only a cursory review of the Freeh Report, I sent an email to Sally Jenkins
and Sara Ganim challenging some of the
findings/assertions in the report. Jenkins provided a weak response to
just one of the challenges and had no response for the rest. Ganim, as usual, didn’t respond at all.
By
Ray Blehar
In
Tuesday's blogpost, I shared an email
response that Sally Jenkins sent me on July 13, 2012 -- just a day after Louis Freeh released the Freeh Report and held a widely televised press
conference.
What you didn't see is my initial
email to Jenkins and Sara Ganim that
challenged several of the assertions made by Freeh.
From: Ray Blehar [rayblehar@yahoo.com]
Sent: 07/13/2012 02:25 PM MST
To: "sganim@pnco.com" <sganim@pnco.com>; Sally Jenkins
Subject: Freeh report - evidentiary leaps
Sent: 07/13/2012 02:25 PM MST
To: "sganim@pnco.com" <sganim@pnco.com>; Sally Jenkins
Subject: Freeh report - evidentiary leaps
In reading through
the Freeh report and hearing some
of his public statements, I found that some of the conclusions about Spanier, Curley,
Schultz, and Paterno are unsupported by
the evidence in the report and the report relies on hindsight in a number of
occasions to proscribe how PSU officials
should have reacted to the incidents. While many of the conclusions in
the report are correct and undeniable, I believe Judge Freeh took evidentiary leaps or used information that
occurred outside of the timeframe of
the incidents to come to the conclusions and/or suggest actions.
1. Freeh states Paterno (among others) was kept informed
of the 1998 investigation.
This is
unsupported by the evidence, which consist of just two e-mails. The
first e-mail vaguely states the coach was informed and the second that he
inquired about the status. There is no evidence of other updates to Paterno. Based on the evidence, Freeh cannot even
reasonably conclude that Paterno got EVEN one
update. Freeh also
admits that his investigation could not find information that Paterno was even informed of the result of the
1998 investigation.
Jenkins attempted to defend
this argument, stating that the two emails were "slam dunks" that "Paterno was fully briefed on a police
investigation he followed anxiously in 1998."
For the record, here are
those "slam dunk" emails.