Judge says no more questions about Lance Armstrong’s fender bender
A federal judge has denied a request by U.S. Justice Department attorneys to ask Lance Armstrong more questions about his controversial traffic accident last year in Aspen, Colo.
The issue came up again when Armstrong testified in a pretrial deposition last month as part of the federal government’s $100 million civil fraud lawsuit against him. Armstrong’s attorney objected to the government’s questions about it, saying they were only trying to harass the former cyclist. But the government argued they were relevant to Armstrong’s credibility, or lack thereof.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper sided with Armstrong in a ruling issued Thursday.
“The Court will not reopen Armstrong’s deposition to allow him to be questioned regarding a December 2014 traffic incident in Aspen, Colorado, an issue that is not directly relevant to any of the claims and defenses in this case,” Cooper wrote.
Armstrong was behind the wheel of an SUV when hit two parked cars in Aspen in December 2014. But he and his girlfriend initially made a “joint decision” to have her lie to police and take the blame for it instead to avoid bad publicity. She later told the police the truth, and Armstrong pleaded guilty to careless driving.
“The Court will reserve ruling on the admissibility of any evidence related to the Aspen incident that the Government seeks to introduce or elicit at trial,” Cooper wrote.
Cooper also granted Armstrong’s request for more time to grill a designated government witness under oath about various topics as part of his defense.
The government is suing him on behalf of the U.S. Postal Service, which paid more than $30 million to sponsor his cycling team from 1998 to 2004. The government says he violated his team’s contract by doping and then concealed his doping to keep getting rich and avoid paying the money back.
Under the False Claims Act, damages could be tripled to nearly $100 million. But Armstrong’s attorneys say this is much ado about zero damages. They say the USPS suffered no harm from Armstrong’s doping and instead profited from the positive publicity generated by Armstrong when he was at the height of his success.
“This is really going to be a very central part of this case because there's a lot of evidence of tremendous benefits to the government,” Elliot Peters, Armstrong’s attorney told Cooper during a teleconference in June, according to a transcript. “And if you net it out and it's zero, the net harm is zero, then we're all spending a lot of time and money and energy over something which may not be worth very much.”
As such, Armstrong’s attorneys have expressed interested in asking the designated government witness about USPS-commissioned evaluations showing that the USPS earned $138 million to $147 million in free advertising from 2001-2004 as a result of Armstrong’s Tour de France wins.
Additionally, Armstrong’s attorneys argue the USPS should have known about Armstrong’s doping long ago but failed to make a federal case about it until it was too late under the statute of limitations. According to court documents, they recently expressed interest in asking the government about its knowledge of the Festina doping affair in the 1998 Tour de France. This is when USPS employees “learned that doping was endemic in the peloton,” Armstrong’s attorneys stated.
Armstrong’s attorneys said they ran out of time to ask the government witness about such topics during her previous pretrial deposition.
Cooper on Thursday granted Armstrong five additional hours to “fairly examine” the witness.
Armstrong was stripped of all seven of his Tour de France titles in 2012 after lying about his doping for more than a decade and attacking those who challenged his lies. He finally admitted it in January 2013 during a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey.
So far, he’s reached undisclosed settlement agreements to end at least three other civil fraud cases against him that had sought the return of millions of dollars.