NFL Counsel Said Jon Gruden Emails Were Leaked by Commanders, Allen Told Committee

The former Washington executive testified that the leaked e-mails that got Gruden fired were provided by the Washington franchise.

The leaked emails that led to the resignation of former Raiders coach Jon Gruden were leaked by Dan Snyder and the Commanders, according to the report issued by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform on Thursday.

Former team president Bruce Allen testified that an NFL executive told him that Snyder’s representatives leaked Gruden’s emails, which contained misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ language, last year, eventually leading to his resignation from the Raiders.

“By June 2021, Mr. Snyder went one step further: he identified for the NFL ‘specific inappropriate Bruce Allen e-mails’ to bolster the claims that Mr. Allen was to blame for the toxic workplace culture,” the report says. 

“Public reports indicate that, although the NFL found Mr. Allen’s e-mails troubling, it determined that they were ‘outside the scope if the original probe into the Washington Football Team.’ Approximately four months later, in October 2021, Mr. Allen learned that many of the ‘inappropriate’ e-mails obtained by Mr. Snyder from his Commanders e-mail account had been leaked to the Wall Street Journal. According to Mr. Allen, when he called NFL’s counsel, Lisa Friel, to complain, she indicated that the Commanders were responsible for the leak, stating ‘We didn’t do it at the league office. It came out of their side.’”

The emails between Gruden and Allen, of course, were those that were subjected to scrutiny that ultimately led to Gruden’s resignation.

John Brownlee and Stuart Nash, the Commanders’ counsel, furnished a statement to Sports Illustrated on Thursday, which said in part, “These Congressional investigators demonstrated, almost immediately, that they were not interested in the truth, and were only interested in chasing headlines by pursuing one side of the story. Today’s report is the predictable culmination of that one-sided approach. … Today’s report does not advance public knowledge of the Washington Commanders workplace in any way. The team is proud of the progress it has made in recent years in establishing a welcoming and inclusive workplace, and it looks forward to future success, both on and off the field.”

The report from the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday was extensive, covering in detail how the Washington franchise under Snyder covered up decades of alleged sexual misconduct within the organization and obstructed probes into that misconduct. The report also detailed how the NFL “buried” the investigation led by attorney Beth Wilkinson into the franchise.