Lance Armstrong on law: what the evidence says · JRE #737
SUBJECT: LAW
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
when you're an agent for the Food and Drug Administration, I don't know how, I mean, all of these things have missions. He was, you know, he was an agent for the IRS. And so that's when Balco and Bond started. I don't know that doping in baseball is an IRS issue. I don't know that doping and cycling 20 years ago is an issue for the FDA.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Jeff Novitzky was an Internal Revenue Service special agent when he launched the BALCO investigation around 2000, which led to the Barry Bonds perjury case; he later moved to the Food and Drug Administration, and it was in that FDA role that he pursued the doping investigation into Lance Armstrong and the US Postal Service cycling team beginning around 2010. Armstrong's account has the agency-to-case pairing garbled: he describes Novitzky as an IRS agent in the context of "when Balco and Bond started," which is accurate for that earlier case, but the framing implies confusion about why an agency other than the IRS (i.e., the FDA) was involved in his own cycling case, when in fact the FDA was the agency actively investigating him, not a mismatched holdover from BALCO. Contemporary reporting from 2004 and 2012 documents both halves of Novitzky's career: IRS agent during BALCO/Bonds, FDA agent during the Armstrong cycling probe. The underlying premise that Novitzky worked for two different federal agencies across his career is correct, but Armstrong's framing misstates which agency oversaw which case.