The timing does look fishy as does the implementation. Why does he still have the previous phone from the previous year?

And I'll give Wells this, contrary to most of the news coverage at the time, he is not asking for the phone, he is trusting the player and agent or lawyers to do the search.

However, I am not sure this makes a difference. Brady is still bound by a different set of rules than NFL employees so the idea of precedence (see Favre, Brett and Jets masseurs) is an important one. He then turns over the records of all his calls and texts at a subsequent meeting after he is aware that the lack of cooperation is cited as part of his guilt. Goodell then deems this too much work to do, despite the easy calculation that only 28 NFL people would need to be identified and contacted.

So is this a passive aggressive grudge match where one side wants to be able to force the other to do its bidding or is there truly concealment going on? Since the NFL has the phones of all the equipment guys, you need to envision a currently unknown line of communication for it to be on Brady's phone and not the team phones.