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Former Washington Commanders general manager Bruce Allen testified that the NFL's Senior Vice President of the Special Council of Investigations leaked the emails that led to the resignation of former Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden, according to a tweet from Washington Post NFL reporter Mark Maske.
The 79-page report from the United States House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee said by April 2021, Commanders owner Dan Snyder filed a petition in federal court seeking to “compel documents and information from (Bruce Allen).” Snyder and his lawyers collected more than 400,000 emails from Allen's Commanders email account, using them in their public court filings.
Snyder tried to identify “specific inappropriate Bruce Allen emails” for the NFL in June 2021 to further reinforce his claim that Allen was responsible for toxic workplace culture. Though it “found the emails troubling,” the NFL said they were “outside the scope of the original probe of the Washington Football Team.”
By October 2021, Bruce Allen learned that many of the inappropriate emails were leaked to the Wall Street Journal. Allen called Friel to complain, but Friel stated the team was responsible for the leak of the emails that eventually led to Jon Gruden's release from the Raiders.
“We didn't do it at the league office,” Friel said. “It came out of their side.”
Lisa Friel also admitted that Bruce Allen's shadow investigation and “abuse of federal courts” violated NFL policy in a private conversation over one year ago.
The concluded investigation, led by D.C. attorney Beth Wilkinson, showed that Dan Snyder and team executives failed to stop and took part in workplace misconduct.
“The results of the Committee’s investigation, as laid out in the report, are clear,” The committee concluded. “Sexual harassment, bullying and other toxic conduct pervaded the workplace at the Washington Commanders and were perpetuated by a culture of fear instilled by the team’s owner.”
