The House Oversight and Reform Committee investigation delving into the firing of NFL Las Vegas Raider’s coach Jon Gruden just took a turn for the slow lane, as members requested emails pertaining to the ongoing, prior NFL investigation. As history has shown clearly with the Hillary Clinton email investigation, gathering and reading emails can take a very long time.

Add in non-disclosures, a protective NFL, and a recent $10 million fine for workplace harassment against the Washington Football Team, and it may be a very long time for this committee to get answers to their questions.

The congressional committee has asked specifically to see the Washington Football Team’s emails that led to Gruden’s being fired, but it also asked for other related documents.

This request into the overarching, ongoing probe the NFL and Washington Football team are undergoing was launched in 2020, well before the leaked racist and anti-gay Gruden emails.

The NFL has legal restrictions placed upon people sharing information about the inner workings of the Washington Football Team’s workplace culture but has said they would cooperate with the Congressional committee. In effect, the NFL agreed to turn over specific documents to the investigation, but how much of the information the league will share is not defined in full.

NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said they answered questions posed by the Congressional committee but are still working on legal issues in releasing more non-disclosure documents.

“As we have discussed with the Committee, we are in the process of identifying responsive documents while working through issues of privilege and anonymity promised to participants in the investigation,” said McCarthy.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said witnesses and victims are free to speak to the public, but in reality, anyone who signed a non-disclosure agreement is not legally able to discuss or share this protected information.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D., Ill.), head of an oversight subcommittee, said that non-disclosure agreements with Washington Football Team owner Dan Snyder may be a strong deterrent to witnesses coming forward.

“While Commissioner Roger Goodell has told the press that victims and witnesses are free to take their story public, he should know many of them do not have that option,” Krishnamoorthi said. “If the NFL and the WFT are serious about addressing, among other things, sexual harassment within their organizations, they must allow these individuals to speak freely. The NFL has committed to producing documents. We look forward to seeing them.”

This investigation was initiated in 2020, following a Washington Post article reporting that fifteen women working for the WFT were sexually or verbally harassed on the job. As investigations delved into the work culture of the team, similar incidents and resulting settlements involving Snyder were disclosed. The NFL shared the general, but not specific, results of their investigation, including female staff endured sexual harassment and that the staff in the WFT workplace were “highly unprofessional” in its treatment of women.

The report concluded that Snyder and senior management did not address these issues and fined WFT $10 million.

With the lack of transparency resulting from the broad NFL report, numerous attorneys representing former WFT employees criticized the NFL, saying there was no concrete way to see if senior management and Snyder were being properly penalized. At the time, Commissioner Goodell said not releasing a detailed report was because they had to protect the confidentiality of witnesses.

In October 2021 an article published by The Wall Street Journal reported Gruden’s racist email description of NFL Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith. The email and others including anti-gay content were found in the inbox of Washington Football Team executive Bruce Allen.

Gruden, the only person whose inappropriate emails were outed to date, was not an employee of the WFT, even though the ongoing investigation was supposedly delving into the work culture of the NFL team.

When the scandal became public, Gruden resigned as coach of the Raiders.

Now, facing what experts say will be a drawn-out affair, it looks like the Congressional Committee needs a Hail Mary.