John Edwards on Trial
Late last week former North Carolina senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards was indicted on charges that he violated campaign finance laws during his 2008 presidential campaign.
While many readers might be familiar with the broad outlines of the Edwards scandal, The Scrapbook feels obligated to recap the sordid saga, and to spell out some of the new details revealed in USA v. Johnny Reid Edwards—just for the sake of posterity.
As you may recall, during the 2008 campaign, while Edwards’s much-beloved wife Elizabeth was suffering from breast cancer (which would claim her life two years later), Edwards was having an affair with one Rielle Hunter, born Lisa Jo Druck and also known as Lisa Hunter, Lisa Jo Hunter, and Rielle Jaya James Druck.
As a teenager, Druck/Hunter was an accomplished equestrian until her father—like Edwards, a wealthy attorney—was implicated in an insurance fraud scandal. Convicted horse killer Tommy “The Sandman” Burns told the FBI he was hired by Druck to electrocute his daughter’s prize show jumper Henry the Hawk in order to collect a large settlement.
Rielle later dropped out of college to go to Hollywood, a career that peaked with a bit part as a reporter in the forgettable Denzel Washington and John Lithgow thriller Ricochet. She later had a relationship with “brat pack” novelist Jay -McInerney. The author’s 1988 roman à clef, Story of My Life, features a character based on Rielle who is portrayed as an emotionally disturbed “postmodern Holly Golightly.”
Two failed marriages and an appearance on the Game Show Network series Lingo later, Hunter met Edwards at a bar in New York in 2006. Shortly afterwards, she formed a video production company. Five days after Hunter’s Midline Groove Productions was incorporated, Edwards’s campaign committee paid her $100,000 and she was brought on board Edwards’s campaign to film the candidate’s every move.
In October 2007, the National -Enquirer reported that Edwards was having an affair with a former campaign staffer, later identified as Hunter. The mainstream media were dismissive of the report, to put it mildly. In July 2008, the Enquirer reported that Edwards was the father of Hunter’s newborn child. Hunter’s attorney later stated that she was refusing a paternity test.
In August 2008, Edwards admitted to the extramarital affair but denied paternity. In January 2010, longtime Edwards aide Andrew Young, who had moved Hunter in with his family while she was pregnant, published a book, The Politician, saying that Edwards was the father. Later that month, Edwards went on ABC’s Nightline and admitted paternity.
Enter longtime Edwards fund-raiser and one of the nation’s most famous trial lawyers, Fred “The King of Torts” Baron, whose firm is notorious for its shady legal tactics and outsize political influence. According to the grand jury indictment, Baron gave Andrew Young at least one envelope containing $1,000 in cash ostensibly to help care for Hunter while Edwards was still denying the relationship. The envelope also contained a note, “Old Chinese saying: use cash, not credit cards!” Baron died of cancer in 2008.
Just prior to the indictment, Edwards also met with one of his other major campaign donors, Rachel “Bunny” Lowe Lambert Lloyd Mellon—the 100-year-old billionaire widow of banking heir Paul Mellon. Bunny Mellon is now alleged to have written several checks to help cover up the Hunter affair. In a move intended to fool authorities, she wrote things such as “chairs,” “antique Charleston table,” and “book case” in the memo section of the checks. Ahead of the trial, Mellon has retained as counsel William Taylor III, best known for representing former IMF head and accused hotel maid rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
More details are sure to be revealed if the Edwards case goes to trial. In a related matter, Hunter has an ongoing lawsuit to reclaim from Andrew Young a sex tape she made with Edwards.
The moral depravity of John Edwards is seemingly boundless, so expect a few more surprises as the trial gets underway.
It’s worth remembering that Edwards came close to being a heartbeat away from the presidency. But voters in both 2004 and 2008 wisely refused his troth—no thanks to the mainstream media, which erected a cordon sanitaire around the Edwards rumors while the National Enquirer did the job they had no stomach for. ♦
Worshiping the New York Times
The big media news this week was that Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, is stepping down after eight years of running the Grey Lady. He is being replaced by Jill Abramson, a former Washington correspondent and longtime Times employee.
On Thursday, June 2, the Times’s Media and Advertising section ran the obligatory “Abramson Named Executive Editor at The Times” story, which probably would have been largely ignored if it weren’t for one laughably revealing quotation.
“In my house growing up, the Times substituted for religion,” Abramson said. “If the Times said it, it was the absolute truth.” Later in the article, Abramson further describes her new position as “ascending to Valhalla.”
Suffice it to say, Abramson’s statement about worshiping at the altar of the Times was immediately and widely mocked by everyone from bloggers to the Wall Street Journal. They must have been embarrassed on Eighth Avenue, because the next day, the quote disappeared from the Times article online, with no mention of the fact that the article had been edited.
Curiously enough, prior to her assuming the helm of the Times, Abramson was notable for her defense of the paper against accusations of bias after it was heavily criticized for not reporting on the scandal involving the Obama White House’s “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones. The Times didn’t breathe a word about the matter until after Jones had been ousted from the White House following revelations that he had signed a “truther” petition alleging that the U.S. government was behind the attacks on 9/11.
Abramson observed that the paper didn’t cover the scandal because “Mr. Jones was not a high-ranking official.” Jones was responsible for overseeing $80 billion in federal contracts, and the Times had previously described Jones as “one of Mr. Obama’s top advisers.”
Abramson may think she’s ascending to Valhalla, but for those of us who think a “paper of record” shouldn’t be creating its own reality, it looks more like Götterdämmerung. ♦
Old-Times Stuff
And while we’re on the subject of the New York Times: The Scrapbook would urge readers to make sure they’ve taken their blood pressure medication before turning to the Arts & Leisure section in the Sunday, May 29, edition. There you will find a front page story by Neil Genzlinger, “Old-Time Stuff Is Not Forgotten.”
About 24 column inches into this essay on Civil War memorabilia, Genzlinger makes one of those little offhand statements that reveals how deeply internalized is the malady of New-York-Times-Think: “The mind-sets and divisions of the 1860s, of course, are still evident today, in the red state-blue state split, the veiled racism of some political discourse and yes, even the relatively benign world of artifact buying and selling.”
Genzlinger seems to know something we don’t about which side Republicans were on in the War Between the States. Maybe the history books are all wrong. ♦
Left Coast News
Perhaps you’ve heard about the ballot measure they’ll be voting on in San Francisco this November? As our occasional contributor Debra J. Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle reports, “Sadly, because a fringe group garnered the necessary 7,168 signatures,” voters will be asked to outlaw circumcision in the city.
In her aptly named (and terrific!) blog for the paper, “Token Conservative,” Saunders wonders “if the folks behind the circumcision ballot measure . . . are anti-Semites.” They deny it, of course—claiming to be defenders of the human rights of infant boys. But they seem to have no trouble consorting with flat out anti-Semites.
The website promoting the ballot measure links to a site running a comic-book series that propagandizes for the ban. The ballot campaign and the comic books are creatures of the same activist, Matthew Hess. Depicted here is one of the characters on Hess’s site. Charming. ♦