When Rick Snider joined The Junkies early Monday to discuss the sale of the Commanders being agreed to, one of the things he mentioned was that the NFL used leverage with the results of the Mary Jo White report to force Daniel Snyder to agree to the deal.
Don Van Natta, an investigative reporter for ESPN, co-authored a story released Friday about that very subject, and when he jumped on with The Junks later Monday, his thoughts seemed to corroborate some of what Snider was saying.
“Our story dropped at noon on Friday, just a few hours before that sale agreement came out, and we wrote that Snyder and his lawyers were lobbying the NFL to limit the release of Mary Jo White’s report into allegations against him and financial improprieties surrounding the team,” Van Natta said. “Our sources, including someone close to Snyder, told us his lawyers were pushing hard for this all the way to Friday morning, but just because there is an agreement doesn’t mean he has dropped his objections to what is released from that report. He is motivated to try to keep any details from that report from becoming public.”
Apparently, what Snyder wants is a repeat of July 2021: when Beth Wilkinson’s investigation results were released simply as a broad spectrum of news, done on a holiday weekend no less, which resulted in Snyder simply agreeing to step away from the team for a while.
“He doesn’t have much leverage, and multiples sources told us Mary Jo White’s work is all but done,” Van Natta said. “He wants a result similar to 2021, but our understanding is he’s not going to get it, and there will be findings of some kind. Lisa Banks, the attorney for many former employees, was on the record saying that if these findings are released, they shouldn’t be watered-down, truncated findings. There’s a lot of pressure being brought on the NFL and Roger Goodell for Mary Jo White’s report to be released completely.”
Wilkinson was hired by Snyder before the NFL took over the investigation, but this one was actually triggered by the NFL about 15 months ago, and has investigation going back to incidents that happened in 2009, so it’s much more than just an internal investigation.
So, then, did Snyder indeed think agreeing to the sale was his leverage to get this swept under the rug, as Rick Snider suggested?
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“That was the ask and has been the ask: that you bury it if you get what you want,” Van Natta said. “The NFL has wanted to be rid of him a long time, so the leverage is I’ll go forward with this if you make it similar to the Beth Wilkinson findings – and you saw that a few hours after we dropped this story, the announcement came out. But the sale agreement is between Snyder and Josh Harris, the issue on the Mary JO White report is between Snyder and the NFL…and there’s optics here about why the NFL hasn’t done anything going all the way back to 2009, too, so they want this to all go away.”
And then, Van Natta dropped a bombshell about White herself.
“I’ve heard over the weekend that people are hearing from Mary Jo White that she is insisting her full findings be made public by the NFL,” Van Natta said. “She works for the NFL, but she wants her work released, because those are the assurances she and her attorneys have made to the witnesses.”
Snyder’s support level from other owners around the league is virtually nil, so it seems as if the sale will easily be ratified by the three-quarters needed to do so, and asking about the findings being minimized certainly aren’t helping – the question, Van Natta says, is “where on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being everything, will the reveal of the findings of the White investigation land.”
So, with owners’ meetings coming next week, what does Van Natta think will ultimately come of the sale timeline?
“I don’t know if the due diligence of the NFL Finance Committee, looking at all the limited partners, will be done in time for those meetings, but we’re in the home stretch,” Van Natta said. “There may be some tentative agreement from the owners, or there may be a special meeting sometime this summer to finally close the books on all this. I know there’s a two-hour privileged session at those meetings, and I have to think the Mary Jo White investigation will be discussed in that session.”
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