“I told him if it was true that he was having an affair with Ms. Hunter, he should not run for president,” Mr. Scher testified. “If it was true, eventually it would come out, and it would destroy his political career.”
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Jim R. Bounds/Associated Press Testimony showed the strains that Mr. Edwards's affair with Rielle Hunter, above, put on the campaign. “I found it all a little unnerving,” one aide testified about an encounter she witnessed between Mr. Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth Edwards.
Interactive Feature: Milestones: John Edwards
Related Edwards Jury Retires for the Weekend(May 19, 2012) Edwards Defense Asks the Jury to Distinguish Sin From Crime(May 18, 2012) Edwards Charged With Election Finance Fraud(June 4, 2011)
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Mr. Edwards said he understood. But after Ms. Hunter showed up on a trip yet one more time, the two men exchanged profanities in a telephone call. Mr. Edwards told him he did not need a baby sitter. Mr. Scher quit the campaign.
The two worlds of Mr. Edwards were perhaps never closer than when he announced his candidacy in December 2006. He arrived in Chapel Hill for an afternoon rally, Ms. Hunter filming his approach to the stage, where Mrs. Edwards and their children waited.
Mr. Young testified that Mr. Edwards asked him to keep his wife and his mistress from running into each other that day. He failed. The next day, Mrs. Edwards would say later, Mr. Edwards told her that he had slept with Ms. Hunter once. It was over.
With that, Ms. Hunter was off the campaign, and Mrs. Edwards began keeping a close eye on her husband.
But he could not stay away. He started using staff cellphones and even secured a special one Mr. Young would hand to him when they left North Carolina for the campaign trail. They called it the bat phone. All one of them had to do was start humming the theme to Batman when the phone needed to be put to use.
John Davis, who took care of Mr. Edwards’s personal needs, saw Ms. Hunter in a Detroit hotel in February 2007. “She said she and Senator Edwards were very much in love,” he told the jury.
Later, in September, when Mr. Edwards was picking up an endorsement from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, Mr. Davis went to Mr. Edwards’s room to retrieve his phone. Mr. Edwards had the speaker on.
“I heard him ask Rielle if she was showing yet,” Mr. Davis told the jury.
The couple conceived the baby around May 28, 2007, about the time Mr. Edwards announced new proposals for veterans as part of his campaign. The date, along with evidence about her menstrual cycle and gynecological appointments, were evidence in the trial.
Eventually, Ms. Hunter caused so much havoc on the road that a staff member called the campaign a “traveling freak show.”
By the time the campaign was preparing for the Iowa caucuses, Mrs. Edwards was beside herself with rage when she discovered that two close friends and campaign contributors — Fred Baron and Lisa Blue Baron, lawyers from Texas — were secretly taking Ms. Hunter on shopping trips to Los Angeles.
What she did not know was that Mr. Baron was providing what would eventually total more than $800,000 in jets, cash and rent to help hide Ms. Hunter, the Youngs and their children.
His money, along with $725,000 from Rachel Mellon, an heiress, are at the heart of Mr. Edwards’s indictment.
Jennifer Palmieri, a close friend of Mrs. Edwards and a former press secretary to her husband who is now in the White House communications office, recalled walking into the Iowa hotel room where Mrs. Edwards was screaming at him and the Barons. While Mr. Edwards stood by silently, the Barons explained they were simply trying to keep Ms. Hunter placated so she would not go public.
“I found it all a little unnerving,” Ms. Palmieri testified.
Mr. Edwards finished second in Iowa, went on to lose badly in New Hampshire and South Carolina and dropped out of the race in January 2008.
Mrs. Edwards died in December 2010. Mr. Edwards was indicted in June 2011. His trial began in April, and lawyers offered their closing arguments on Thursday.
To close their case, the government dug up that old stump speech.
Mr. Edwards, said a prosecutor, Bobby Higdon, violated the very campaign restrictions designed to protect “the two Americas” so he could become president.
“Campaign finance laws are designed to bring the two Americas together at election time,” Mr. Higdon said. “John Edwards forgot his own rhetoric.” |
