Lance Armstrong Gets USADA Deadline Extended, Sued By SCA Promotions

AUSTIN, Texas -- Lance Armstrong on Wednesday was given more time to think about whether he wants to cooperate with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Separately, he learned that he's about to be sued.

USADA, the agency that investigated the cyclist's performance-enhancing drug use and banned him for life from sports, has given him an extra two weeks to decide if he'll speak with investigators under oath. The agency has said cooperating in its cleanup effort is the only path to Armstrong getting his ban reduced. The agency extended its original Wednesday deadline to Feb. 20.

Earlier in the day, SCA Promotions in Dallas said it will sue Armstrong on Thursday to recover more than $12 million it paid him in bonuses for winning the Tour de France seven times.

SCA Promotions tried to withhold the bonuses in 2005 amid doping allegations against the cyclist. The company wants its money back, plus fees and interest, now that Armstrong has admitted he used performance-enhancing drugs and has been stripped of those victories.

Armstrong testified under oath in 2005 that he didn't use steroids, other drugs or blood doping methods to win. A spokesman for SCA said the lawsuit will be filed in Dallas.

"Mr. Armstrong's legal team and representatives claimed repeatedly that SCA would only be entitled to repayment if Mr. Armstrong was stripped of his titles, and since that has now come to pass, we intend to hold them to those statements," the company said.

Armstrong attorney Tim Herman did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

Also on Wednesday, the federal Food and Drug Administration said it is not investigating Armstrong. FDA spokeswoman Sarah Clark-Lynn made the statement following stories by ABC News and USA Today Sports.

Quoting an unidentified person that it called a "high-level source," ABC said that federal agents are actively investigating Armstrong for obstruction, witness tampering and intimidation. On Wednesday, USA Today Sports reported that the FDA "is investigating the Lance Armstrong case."

The news reports came after a statement by U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte, whose office conducted a criminal investigation of Armstrong, closing the probe a year ago without bringing any charges. Armstrong subsequently admitted to the drug use he long denied after USADA went ahead with its own investigation.

Birotte said that "we've been well-aware of the statements that have been made by Mr. Armstrong and other media reports. That has not changed my view at this time. Obviously, we'll consider, we'll continue to look at the situation, but that hasn't changed our view as I stand here today."

Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler declined to say whether any other component of the department is investigating Armstrong.

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Associated Press writer Pete Yost in Washington contributed to this report.

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The Fiscal Cliff: Congress Created Looming Deadline To Avert Collapse

By Fred Barbash

WASHINGTON, Jan 2 (Reuters) - Setting a looming deadline to avert self-created calamity has become a frequent device for the U.S. Congress to get things done in recent years. When all else fails, as it often does, it's supposed to frighten members into action.

That was the idea when Congress created the "fiscal cliff" in August, 2011 to resolve a partisan struggle, also with a deadline and also self-created, over raising the federal debt ceiling.

Catastrophic budget cuts, timed to coincide with the threat of hefty income tax increases, would finally produce big cuts in the soaring federal budget by Dec. 31, 2012, or else.

It didn't work.

Congress scared everyone but Congress, which while cutting taxes for most and raising them for a few, made no pretense of trying to make any progress toward reducing the deficit.

"We created a monster," Democratic Representative Charles Rangel of New York said on the floor of the House of Representatives on Tuesday night just before a House vote averted most of the effects of the fiscal cliff.

"This fandango was an immense embarrassment," American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein said in an interview with Reuters, calling it "cringeworthy."

And "the fact that we are going to have another disastrous confrontation over the debt limit in two months, with the radical right wing of the House Republicans determined to send us over the edge if they don't get their way, is actually frightening."

"This House could have done worse, by rejecting the plan" to avoid the cliff, he said, "but it has done nothing to challenge its record as at minimum the worst Congress in our lifetimes."

The next confrontation to which Ornstein referred is likely to start heating up in a matter of weeks in anticipation of the need to once again raise the borrowing limit for the government beyond the current level of about $16 trillion. The risk will be a default by the government.

'PSYCHOLOGICAL FALLOUT'

Republicans in Congress, many of whom acknowledged publicly that they took a beating from President Barack Obama in the contest over the cliff, are promising to pursue spending cuts with extra vigor as a condition for approving the debt ceiling increase in the Republican-controlled House.

Historically, each partisan grudge match over spending has tended to make the next one even more bitter.

Alice Rivlin, a former U.S. budget director and Brookings Institution budget expert, also worries about "psychological fallout" from the battle over the cliff that could spill over into the debt ceiling struggle as well as contribute to the global perception that when it comes to the economy, the U.S. can't govern itself.

"It's very bad for the economy," she said in an interview with Reuters, "and for our image in the world. We don't look like a country in charge of its own destiny. That's hard to quantify but it's bad."

"This is a Congress that can barely get its work done - especially when confronting the most important issues of the day," said Sarah Binder, a George Washington University expert on Congress.

"In many ways, public disgust with Congress is already baked in: the public's expectations are so low that it's hard for Congress to surprise us," she said in an interview with Reuters.

That wasn't the way Minority Leader Mitch McConnell - the chief architect of the cliff - expressed it on Aug. 1, 2011 as he spoke on the Senate floor.

"It might have appeared to some as though their government wasn't working," he said, "but in fact the opposite was true. The push and pull Americans saw in Washington these past few weeks was not gridlock, it was the will of the people working itself out in a political system that was never meant to be pretty."

Republican Representative David Dreier of California expressed a similar sentiment Monday night as the House closed the loop on the plan McConnell designed.

"This is the greatest deliberative body known to man," he said. (Editing by Eric Walsh)

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.

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