Inquiry on Lance Armstrong Ends With No Charges

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Federal prosecutors said Friday that they had closed their investigation of Lance Armstrong without charging him, nearly two years after they began looking into allegations that he and his cycling teammates committed a variety of possible crimes by doping.
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Lance Armstrong has never officially tested positive for an illegal substance.

The possible crimes being investigated included the defrauding of the government, drug trafficking, money laundering and conspiracy involving Armstrong and other top cyclists. In particular, the authorities were exploring whether money from the United States Postal Service, the primary team sponsor for the first four of Armstrong’s Tour de France wins, was used to buy performance-enhancing drugs.

André Birotte Jr., the United States Attorney for the Central District of California, announced the end of the high-profile investigation, which involved several federal agencies, in a brief statement. He did not cite a reason for the decision and declined further comment.

“The United States Attorney determined that a悬疑电视剧
public announcement concerning the closing of the investigation was warranted by numerous reports about the investigation in media outlets around the world,” the statement said. A grand jury in Los Angeles was convened as part of the investigation.

Armstrong, who won the Tour de France a record seven times, has always emphatically denied all accusations that he used illegal performance-enhancing drugs. But his first Tour de France win in 1999 followed the event’s largest doping scandal and ever since he has fought suspicions that his Tour titles were tainted by drug use. But he has never tested positive for any illegal substance. (At the 1999 Tour, he failed a test for a corticosteroid but produced a doctor’s note indicating that the drug had been used for therapeutic reasons.)

“I am gratified to learn that the U.S. Attorney’s Office is closing its investigation,” Armstrong said in a statement. “It is the right decision and I commend them for reaching it. I look forward to continuing my life as a father, a competitor, and an advocate in the fight against cancer without this distraction.”

John Keker, Armstrong’s lead lawyer in the case,古装悬疑电视剧
said in an interview Friday that he learned of the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s decision earlier in the day, at about the same it was announced publicly. He declined to comment on why the investigation was dropped but praised prosecutors’ decision to step away from the inquiry.

“I’m pleased,” he said. “They made the right decision, and they made it on their own.”

Jeff Novitzky, a special agent for the Food and Drug Administration, was principally involved with the Armstrong investigation. As an agent for the Internal Revenue Service, he brought down the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative doping lab.

Novitzky did not respond to requests for comment.

Although Armstrong no longer faces the prospect of criminal prosecution, Travis T. Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti Doping Agency, said that his organization would continue to investigate him.

“Unlike the U.S. Attorney, Usada’s job is to protect clean sport rather than enforce specific criminal laws,” Tygart said in a statement. “Our investigation into doping in the sport of cycling is continuing and we look forward to obtaining the information developed during the federal investigation.”

Tygart declined to comment on what information his agency has received. Several former teammates, friends and associates of Armstrong were brought before the grand jury, but that testimony is under seal. The names of those witnesses, however, became so widely known that Armstrong’s lawyers asked a federal judge to determine the source of the leaks.

Any finding against Armstrong by Usada would be primarily symbolic now that he is retired. Whether it could mean the removal of any of his race titles 悬疑电影推荐
is unclear. After Bjarne Riis confessed in 2007 to winning the 1996 Tour de France by doping, the race organizer ultimately decided to just to place an asterisk beside his name in its official records after concluding that it could not change results after more than 10 years. Novitzky initially began looking into doping related to Rock Racing, a now-defunct, minor professional team based in the Los Angeles. But he turned his attention to Armstrong after Floyd Landis, a former teammate, claimed in 2010 that Armstrong and other riders on the Postal Service team engaged in systematic doping. Landis won the 2006 Tour de France only to have the title stripped after he tested positive for testosterone.

Because the doping allegations involved activities outside of the United States, the investigation focused on secondary events like the source of the money used by the team to buy drugs and whether Armstrong and the team defrauded the Postal Service when they promised to adhere to anti-doping rules as part of the sponsorship agreement.