Federal prosecutors to inject surprise witness in Bonds trial: Says she saw Bonds inject

Federal prosecutors say they will produce a witness who saw Greg Anderson inject some boost into Barry Bonds.  The contents of that boost may not matter, but the injection may , as the Feds charge Bonds with lying to a Grand Jury.  Other witnesses, including some ex-baseball teammates of the Giant slugger will also be called to the witness stand.  They all should be on their best behavior, without lies.  To the New York Times:

Federal prosecutors said on Friday that they planned to call Barry Bonds’s former personal shopper at his perjury trial next month to testify that she saw Bonds being injected by Greg Anderson, his trainer.

Kathy Hoskins, the former personal shopper, is the sister of Steve Hoskins, a childhood friend and former business manager of Bonds’s and a person expected to be a key witness against him at trial.

The disclosure, in a pretrial filing by the prosecution, did not say what Kathy Hoskins thought Bonds was being injected with. But that may not matter. In the government’s indictment of Bonds, it said that Bonds lied when he testified before a grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative in 2003 that he was never injected by anyone other than his own doctors.

Kathy Hoskins “will further testify that she observed interactions between the defendant and Greg Anderson,” the filing said, “including Anderson giving the defendant an injection.”

The trial, slated for March 2, will also produce Giant players like Benito Santiago, and the ever present Jason Giambi:

The filing by the prosecutors listed current and former baseball players — including Jason Giambi, his brother Jeremy and Benito Santiago — who will testify about how they received performance-enhancing drugs from Anderson. The prosecutors said that Bobby Estalella, who played with Bonds on the San Francisco Giants in 2000 and 2001, will testify that Bonds admitted to him that he was using performance-enhancing drugs.

Hoskins, however, was a surprise to the press.

But it was the new information about Kathy Hoskins that was the most surprising development in the filing. Last week, the prosecution was set back when United States District Judge Susan Illston indicated she was inclined to throw out several pieces of evidence against Bonds, including positive steroid tests and doping calendars that the prosecution believes link him to drug use.

But Kathy Hoskins’s testimony underscores that the government is also accusing Bonds of perjury for denying that anyone but doctors injected him.

We would suggest Hoskins watch her back the next few weeks...