John Edwards, Federal Investigation

UPDATE, May 5, 2009: Elizabeth Edwards talks to Oprah Winfrey about John Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter.

She says she has "no idea" if her husband fathered the baby of his mistress.

"I've seen a picture of the baby. I have no idea. It doesn't look like my children, but I don't have any idea."

Video.
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These days, things really aren't going well for John Edwards.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- His once-prominent political career is buried and the turmoil of his marriage is playing out in public. Now, John Edwards is facing a federal inquiry.

The two-time Democratic presidential candidate acknowledged Sunday that investigators are assessing how he spent his campaign funds — a subject that could carry his extramarital affair from the tabloids to the courtroom. Edwards' political action committee paid more than $100,000 for video production to the firm of the woman with whom Edwards had an affair.

The former North Carolina senator said in a carefully worded statement that he is cooperating.

"I am confident that no funds from my campaign were used improperly," Edwards said in the statement. "However, I know that it is the role of government to ensure that this is true. We have made available to the United States both the people and the information necessary to help them get the issue resolved efficiently and in a timely matter."

While Edwards focused his comment on campaign funds, he also had a range of other fundraising organizations — including two nonprofits and a poverty center at his alma mater — that have come under scrutiny.

Chief among them was the PAC that paid Rielle Hunter's company for several months in 2006 for Web videos that documented Edwards' travels and advocacy in the months leading up to his 2008 presidential campaign. The committee also paid her firm an additional $14,086.50 on April 1, 2007.

We don't need to rush to judgment on this investigation to come to the conclusion that John Edwards is scum.

I was such a fool for coming to his defense when allegations of an affair first surfaced in 2007.

When The Enquirer went with the story, I considered it tabloid trash. I would not believe that Edwards would betray his wife, Elizabeth, particularly given her health issues.

I was wrong. He did. If he misused campaign funds, it wouldn't surprise me. If he can do what he did to his wife, he's capable of anything.

...Since announcing the affair, Edwards has remained largely secluded, and he canceled all his public appearances before the November election because he said he didn't want to be a distraction for Obama.

His wife, Elizabeth, who is terminally ill with cancer, will soon be releasing a book talking about the affair. In it, she writes that news of the affair made her vomit. She also describes Hunter as "pathetic."

Hunter may be pathetic, but she's no more pathetic than John Edwards.

I have sympathy for Elizabeth. She's struggling with a terminal illness at the same time she's dealing with this horrible betrayal.

Lee Stranahan, The Huffington Post, writes about Elizabeth, "The Lies Of (And To) Elizabeth Edwards." He's painfully honest, to the point of being almost brutal.

Stranahan writes:

Elizabeth Edwards has built up a tremendous reserve of public support and respect. It's earned. She's smart, accomplished, articulate and has suffered far more than her share of personal tragedy. But she also chose to launch a celebrity (sorta) tell-all book called Resilience that covers her husband John Edward's affair and so she opens herself and her relationship up as a subject of public discussion.

So let's be clear; in equal proportion to her victimhood, Elizabeth Edwards also aided and abetted her husband in deceiving Democratic voters on an unprecedented scale.

She helped her husband commit an odd sort of fraud - taking money from thousands of people under false premises, in a sort of personality Ponzi scheme that would have made Bernie Madoff blush. Elizabeth Edwards knew that narrative of the Edwards's personal relationship was a winner with voters and she helped spin it. She was an active part of his campaign and not just for policy reasons.

Electoral politics is, after all, only partially about policy. Elizabeth humanized John Edwards. He's a guy who oozed smarmy, insincere, self-centered lawyer but he's married to Elizabeth, so he might be okay. Elizabeth wasn't a trophy wife; she was a real woman and their love affair story was spiked with elements that gave Edwards more depth, a sense of a man deeper than first appearances.

Together, John and Elizabeth spun the stories in an effort to gain donations and votes. The details they told were true. Anniversaries at the fast food restaurant Wendy's. Her battle with cancer. The unfathomable loss of their son. These facts were and are real but they served as misdirection to another reality - that John Edwards had undertaken an emotional and sexual affair with a campaign worker named Rielle Hunter.

Elizabeth knew.

She knew that her husband had used campaign money to pay his mistress to travel with him. In her book, she apparently claims that she urged her husband to end his Presidential bid...but she kept helping him raise money. She allowed their personal narrative to be the subject of story after story and even stepped it up when her cancer returned.

I've spoken with Edwards supporters who gave him thousands of dollars of hard earned money because they believed in him. Some even convinced other family members to donate to Edwards. They felt betrayed and angry.

Stranahan is right. Elizabeth isn't an entirely innocent figure in this sleazy drama.

I guess in her own way she's pathetic, too.