John Edwards’s trial started this week, and the news just provides more revelations about what a scummy character he is.
When John Edwards started running for president I was in his camp. Among other things, he was the only candidate who really made eradicating poverty the central theme of his campaign. Luckily, given what we have learned since his campaign ended, he didn’t become our candidate.
I don’t care who politicians sleep with. For that matter, I don’t much care who regular people sleep with. When John Edwards was running for president, though, asking people to vote for him, work for him, and give him money, while at the same time he knew he was carrying on an extramarital affair that was bound to demolish his campaign when it came out (hint: it always comes out), that’s when I do care. He wasn’t just putting his marriage and his family at risk, he was putting the faith and efforts of millions of Democrats across the country, and the fate of the 2008 election, at risk.
So that makes him pretty low in my book, but now it turns out that he’s even worse.
His trial started this week, and the news is carrying reports on the potential witnesses both for and against him. According to the Charlotte News and Observer: Cate Edwards, the grown daughter of the former presidential candidate and one-term Democratic senator, could be called to testify on her father’s behalf.
He doesn’t have to do this. He could plead guilty. He could decide not to involve his daughter. Instead, he’s having his daughter testify to defend him against charges that he gave campaign money to the woman he was having an affair with while his wife, his daughter’s mother, was dying of cancer.
How do you do that to your kid?
do you do that to your daughter? One assumes she has a choice. She’s thirty years old, a smart woman, and. by all accounts, a loving daughter. What’s so hard to understand? I would hope that my own family would stand up for me, no matter what happens. We seem to be in this world where no one is worthy of forgiveness. Everyone has to be contrite and then be subject to “he wasn’t contrite enough”.
“He could plead guilty.” That’d be handy if everyone who was guilty plead guilty. There’d be very little need for lawyers. What a breath of fresh air that would be.
She is making adult decisions. Perhaps, having lost her mom, she doesn’t want to also lose her dad. I’d say it’s best not to dwell on motivations and allow the justice system to, you know, work.
Dude’s a scuzzball, but c’mon…
It’s painful to recollect, since we now know he was so willfully negligent of his responsibilities. It’s interesting to note that he shared this “risk-taking” personality with both John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, and probably a host of other presidents who are now rather well regarded.
However that association does little to balm the horror for some of us of having been so wrong. I think it is that horror that may incline us to see every new reveal as even more awful than it might seem to someone who never supported him.
This business with the daughter seems callous, but until we know what new information she might have to bring to the case, we really don’t know if it was essential to put her on the stand.
If, for one moment, we consider the possibility that despite all the repugnant things that Edwards has admitted to doing, he did not, in fact, misuse campaign funds…perhaps his adult daughter, who worked on the campaign has real evidence of his innocence on that one point.
John Edwards goes to trial and Bush,Cheney,Rumsfield and the gang start a war and torture people-they go free.
Edwards’s prosecution is a scam by the Republican Party using the court system to persecute a Democrat for doing 1/10th of the crimes that the GOP commit every single day.
What is news about this Edwards prosecution is that this is political retribution by the Republican Party against the Democrats. That is ALL this is!
“The John Edwards trial is unprecedented. Nobody has been indicted on charges like this before… Sheldon Adelson has spent more than 16 times more that the money implicated in the John Edwards scandal on Newt Gingrich in the 2012 primary. …this case is not about whether or not John Edwards is a bad guy. Ultimately, this [is] whether he took campaign donations that were too big.”
“It is a fact that the U.S. attorney, a staunch Republican who is able to stay in office, thanks to the Republican U.S. attorney scandal stayed in office during the first two years of the Obama administration. That U.S. attorney indicted John Edwards and stepped down and started running as a Republican for congress.”
http://crooksandliars.com/susi…
I could not help but notice that this posting came right after In Memory of Julie Waters: A Clean, Well-lighted Place. That juxtaposition, while not necessarily intentional, was wonderfully appropriate.
I didn’t know John Edwards, and I did not know Julie Waters except through these pages. Having spent many years in politics in D.C. and Vermont, though, I have met all too many political celebrities like John Edwards, many of them narcissists bordering on sociopaths. Fortunately, though, there are many more people who neither seek nor attain the limelight; they live courageously and generously in their little corner of the world, the kind of folks with qualities many of you have associated with Julie Waters. Yes, I regret that there are too many John Edwards in our world, but I am grateful for the many, many more wonderful people whose lives radiate goodness in ways we may never hear of but still make a sometimes cruel world into a slightly better place.
It’s a weird case, given that the underlying claim is that money used to support his mistress – money not handled through his campaign – should have been treated as campaign expenses. Therefore, they exceeded the legal contribution limits and violated the disclosure rules.
Much as I have an intense personal distaste for his conduct, this is a bizarre legal theory in my mind. Does this mean it would have been legal to write campaign checks for that purpose? Should he have started a 527 or Super-PAC? Would that have made it all fine?
The Washington Post’s summary from about 10 months back pretty much covers it: