According to the ESPN story: One day prior, “the league’s lead investigator on the Rice matter [Jim Buckley] had actually told the league’s director of security that he had never requested the inside-casino elevator video from the one law-enforcement agency that actually had it, the Atlantic City Police Department.” Buckley had emailed the league’s chief of security, Jeffrey Miller, saying, “Again, I never spoke to anyone at the casino or the police department about the tape.”
When pressed for an explanation as to this seeming contradiction by the NFL players’ union’s outside counsel, Jeffrey Kessler, Goodell hemmed and hawed, or retreated into a kind of willful obtuseness, including the “not a lawyer” line above.
In what might be the most damning example, Goodell ends a somewhat heated, testy exchange by burbling, “I wasn’t aware of the fact that they tried to get it from law enforcement. I do not know the specifics.”
There’s much, much more, including gobs of evidence that make it eminently clear that the NFL should have known exactly what Rice did even without seeing the video, and a darkly comic scene in which Goodell furrows his brow and labors to recite or describe the full meaning of the meager handwritten notes he took during his initial interview with Rice and Palmer, including vague shorthand phrases like “he’s own it” [sic] and “terrible mistake.”
Here’s the punch line. What was Goodell’s rationale for a seeming lack of diligence? “He prefers to observe players’ actions during a disciplinary hearing.”
