D.C. federal prosecutors have charged Houston Astros shortstop Miguel Tejada with misleading congressional investigators over the use of steroids by his fellow Major League Baseball players.
In a document filed today at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, lawyers from the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office wrote that during a 2005 interview with congressional staffers, Tejada denied having any knowledge of his teammates on the Oakland Athletics, where he played between 1997 and 2003, discussing or using performance-enhancing steroids.
Those claims were later contradicted by George Mitchell’s 2008 report on steroids in baseball, which alleged that while playing for the Athletics, Tejada had several conversations about steroids with teammate Adam Piatt, from whom he eventually purchased several thousand dollars worth of human growth hormone.
“Tejada, before and during his interview with the Committee staff, then and there well knew” that Piatt had used steroids and HGH, wrote Steven Durham, chief of the fraud and public corruption section of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Tejada will appear in court tomorrow at 11 a.m. for a plea hearing before Magistrate Judge Alan Kay. The prosecutors filed their charges today in a criminal information, rather than an indictment. A criminal information is often filed in the lead up to a plea agreement.
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