Legal News

So Much to Say: On John Edwards, Fred Baron and Campaign Laws

By Ashby Jones

Before the shadows have gotten too long on this day, let us blog Sunday’s story in the NYT about John Edwards. It’s largely a political story, granted, but one woven through with a handful of interesting legal threads.

The headline on the story: A federal grand jury in Raleigh is weighing whether campaign laws were broken in Edwards’s effort to hide his affair with Rielle Hunter during and shortly after his presidential campaign.

The Times reports that, according to people familiar with the grand jury investigation, prosecutors are considering filing charges based on a novel legal issue: whether hush money paid to Hunter by Edwards supporters (paid in order to maintain the viability of Edwards’s candidacy) should be considered campaign donations and thus whether they should have been publicly reported.

According to the story, investigators are looking into the the benefits Hunter received from the two Edwards supporters, Fred Baron, the pioneering Texas trial lawyer who has since died, and Rachel Mellon, a 99-year-old heiress to the Mellon fortune. Before his death, Baron said in a statement that he paid Hunter and helped move her and an Edwards aide, Andrew Young to California and other places on his own initiative, without informing Edwards. Edwards has asserted that he knew nothing of the benefits provided to Hunter by Baron or Mellon.

In a book proposal by Andrew Young, however, Young depicts Baron as going to great lengths to help Edwards conceal from the public both his affair with Hunter and his paternity of her daughter. At one point, Young wrote, Edwards asked Baron if he could find a doctor who would falsify a DNA report.

Wade M. Smith, a Raleigh lawyer who represents Edwards, declined to comment on the paternity issue directly, or on any of Young’s other allegations.

So what’s the likelihood of an indictment against Edwards or others? Joe Sinsheimer, a former Democratic consultant who has monitored the Edwards investigation, said it would be difficult for prosecutors to make a case because "the law probably doesn't anticipate payments to a mistress during a campaign."

While violations of campaign finance regulations are not necessarily crimes and may be punished by fines from the Federal Election Commission, they can also break criminal laws if there is evidence of willful deception.

We’re not sure if what follows is our “favorite” detail from the story, but it’s certainly the most jarring, on several levels. According to the Times story, Edwards once calmed Hunter by promising her that after his wife died, he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band. So Much to Say, indeed.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 21, 2009 (boomark / email).