The House Committee on Oversight and Reform released a 79-page report Thursday alleging that Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder “permitted and participated” in the organization’s toxic workplace culture.
Something else of note in the report concerned the fall of former Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden. Gruden resigned in Oct. 2021 after multiple email exchanges between him and former Washington team president Bruce Allen were revealed in a Wall Street Journal story contained racist, misogynistic, and homophobic slurs.
There has long been a debate about who leaked the emails. Snyder has been accused but his wife, and co-owner Tanya Snyder, strongly denied leaking the emails.
According to Allen, in his testimony to the House Committee, an NFL executive told him that the Commanders were responsible for leaking the emails. If true, the goal of Washington would have been to make Allen look bad, whom Snyder had fired in Dec. 2019.
Here’s an excerpt from the report.
According to public court records, in April 2021, Mr. Snyder filed a petition in federal court seeking to compel documents and information from Mr. Allen.136 Around the same time, Mr. Snyder and his lawyers collected more than 400,000 emails from Mr. Allen’s Commanders email account and used some of them in Mr. Snyder’s public court filings. Mr. Snyder also used the information collected on Mr. Allen to present “evidence” to the NFL that Mr. Allen was responsible for the Commanders’ toxic work culture.
By June 2021, Mr. Snyder one went step further: he identified for the NFL “specific inappropriate Bruce Allen emails” to bolster his claims that Mr. Allen was to blame for the toxic workplace culture.139 Public reports indicate that, although the NFL found Mr. Allen’s emails troubling, it determined that they were “outside the scope of the original probe of the Washington Football Team.
In October, Allen had learned that many of the emails obtained by Snyder from his Washington email address had been leaked to the Wall Street Journal.
From there, Allen called NFL counsel Lisa Friel to complain. Friel then allegedly told Allen the Commanders were responsible for the leak.
“We didn’t do it at the league office,” Friel reportedly said. “It came out of their side.”
Allen worked for Washington from Dec. 2009 to Dec. 2019.
