As Deflategate drags on Tom Brady has been getting advice from his agent and now from super lawyer Jeffrey Kessler. The guy Brady should have consulted is former Massachusetts Speaker of the House Charlie Flaherty.

Why Charlie Flaherty you ask? Because Flaherty is an expert on what happens when an investigator digs so deep into your life that he feels compelled to somehow make a case against you. It’s embarrassing to spend all that money, attract all that media attention, dream your own career advancement, and come up with nothing but excuses for your superior.

I’m going to borrow here from an article I did for CommonWealth Magazine in 2011 titled Piling On: Is the storyline on the string of fallen Massachusetts speakers overblown? (My answer was yes). Back in the Nineties Speaker Flaherty attracted the attention of the U.S. Attorney’s office for his sketchy relationships with lobbyists. The feds spent two years investigating a winter trip to Puerto Rico that Flaherty took with lobbyists then turned to his association with a crooked parking lot owner. Unethical as Flaherty’s conduct was, the feds’ investigation dragged on and on without finding a criminal violation. Finally the government dredged up a 13 year old tax case and conflict of interest charges, and an exhausted Flaherty pled to avoid a trial. The late Globe columnist David Nyhan captured the case perfectly:

The gist of the feds’ case, as I get it, is that in 1983 he listed $5,800 in business expense deductions for which he cannot provide documentation now. . . . This is some kind of reach, plucking deductions from taxes of 13 years past. But the feds needed something, anything, to justify their expensive political chase.

So let’s turn to Brady. The NFL knew going into the AFC championship game that it would investigate the footballs used by the Patriots. According to the report put out by the team, The Wells Report in Context, even the proof that the Patriots' footballs were below the allowable psi limit at halftime is questionable. That’s because the league was inconsistent in its use of gauges that provided different readings before the game and at halftime. Often when you start an investigation and can’t even prove for sure anything happened, you’d stop the investigation. Not the NFL.

Rather than set out the details many of us have already read too many times, the Wells Report found that something might have happened to the footballs and if it did it’s more probable than not Patriots' employees were responsible and Tom Brady was generally aware that the thing we’re not sure of probably happened because of the Patriots employees.

That would make perfect sense to Charlie Flaherty.