dcmissle said:
The right guy shows up, just in time. So with this information, one presumably could match it against what Jastremski and McNally provided, right?
The theory behind obstruction has always been that the phone records of those two might be incomplete and that incriminating stuff could be on TB's phone alone. But if there is a complete match between their content and Tom's records, nothing among these three was lost.
But, unfortunately, this would not include incriminating messages to other parties, and spoliation is spoiliation.
It all looks incriminating, and what Tom has just lost in the court's eyes is the benefit of the doubt. Especially if that earlier phone is still hangin around.
This is what I suggested as a possibility upthread, but it got lost in the noise. Yee's statement hinted at sharing unprecedented electronic information and that the NFL ignored it for some reason. We also know that Yee is the one who sent the letter on 6/18 informing the NFL of the phone's destruction.
dcmissle / MSL - If something like the following hypothetical were true, would that save Brady's ass here?
Assume in its last iteration of requesting data from Tom, the NFL asked for;
* Any texts to / from a Patriots employee
* Between dates X and Y
* Regarding game ball preparation OR containing the words "deflate", "needle", or "ball"
And let's say that Brady's team can show through text metadata (sender, recipient, and date/time) that all of the texts with Patriots employees are already in the NFL's possession? Maybe except for Edleman and Gronk, because he often talks to those 2 outside of work, and they haven't been asked for their phones.
It might not be that simple, but I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that they could come up with a reasonable accounting of all relevant texts and show that they really aren't missing much, if anything. There might be other creative methods they applied that I didn't think of here to further rule out texts as irrelevant.
It could explain why Kessler would be willing to offer up the information that the phone was destroyed - because they can show what was on the phone is irrelevant anyways, using the NFL's own search criteria.