For nearly a decade, the president of the Washington Football Team sent emails to a friend in which he casually joked about Native Americans and racial and political diversity, griped about referees and league initiatives to improve player safety, and arranged tickets and perks for his correspondent. He also thanked the man for getting a fine lifted and for understanding the team’s thorniest troubles.
That man was Jeff Pash, who — as the longtime general counsel of the N.F.L. and a top adviser to Commissioner Roger Goodell — would become responsible for investigating the team that had been run by the very executive he grew close to.
Pash appeared to engage willingly in the back-and-forth, sometimes reassuring the Washington executive, Bruce Allen, who was with the club from 2009 to 2019, not to worry about troubles that would eventually rock the team and the league, including reports about harassment of the club’s cheerleaders.
A trove of 650,000 emails gathered in the league’s investigation of workplace misconduct in the Washington Football Team’s front office has already resulted in the resignation of Jon Gruden as coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, after The New York Times published messages in which he made racist, sexist and homophobic remarks. The league received access to the emails several months before the investigation was completed last summer.
But Allen’s exchanges with Pash, sent from 2009 to 2018, reveal a larger story about a clubby relationship between a top league official and team executives and owners he is expected to oversee.
When the N.F.L. fined the Washington Football Team $15,000 for manipulating its player injury report, Allen reached out to Pash and the penalty was rescinded, a routine outcome, the league said. In another email, Allen expressed concern that the commissioner would accuse him of breaking rules on the signing of free agents, prompting his friend to reassure him, “He knows who it is and that it is not you.”
And after a crisis erupted over allegations of sexual harassment of the Washington cheerleaders, Allen contacted Pash, who offered reassuring words.
“I know that you are on it and would not condone something untoward,” he told Allen.
In emails not involving Pash, however, Allen, Gruden and other men had shared photos of women wearing only bikini bottoms, including one picture of two Washington team cheerleaders.
Pash joined the league in 1997, intersecting with Allen, who was a longtime Raiders and Buccaneers executive before he landed in Washington. Their emails suggest that, when the Washington franchise was in crisis, Pash tended to offer a sympathetic shoulder rather than acting as an impartial arbiter.
“Communication between league office employees and club executives occurs on a daily basis,” Jeff Miller, the league’s executive vice president of communications, said in a statement Thursday. “Jeff Pash is a respected and high-character N.F.L. executive. Any effort to portray these emails as inappropriate is either misleading or patently false.”
Miller said Pash paid for the tickets Allen arranged for him.
After The Times contacted the league, the owners of the Arizona Cardinals, Chicago Bears and the Giants expressed support for Pash.
Neither Pash nor Allen responded to a request for comment.