Webloggin » Updated : Confirmed - John Edwards: Just Another Lying, Cheating Democrat Caught Red Handed Doing Something He Claimed Not To Be Doing

Update: John Edwards Admits To Lying About Affair

As if having an extra-marital affair while your wife undergoes cancer treatment is not low enough John Edwards makes the announcement that he lied all along ON A FRIDAY. Hoping that the attention will be minimal with a weekend news release, Mr. scum is telling all, or at least the scripted part to ABC News Nightline:

John Edwards repeatedly lied during his Presidential campaign about an extramarital affair with a novice filmmaker, the former Senator admitted to ABC News today.

In an interview for broadcast tonight on Nightline, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 44-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her.

[~snip]

According to friends of Hunter, Edwards met her at a New York city bar in 2006. His political action committee later paid her $114,000 to produce campaign website documentaries despite her lack of experience.

Edwards said the affair began during the campaign after she was hired. Hunter traveled with Edwards around the country and to Africa.

Edwards said his wife, Elizabeth, and others in his family became aware of the affair in 2006.

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife’s cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

When the National Enquirer first reported the alleged Edwards-Hunter affair last October 11, Edwards, his campaign staff and Hunter vociferously denounced the report.

“The story is false, it’s completely untrue, it’s ridiculous,” Edwards told reporters then.

He repeated his denials just two weeks ago.

Edwards today admitted the National Enquirer was correct when it reported he had visited Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hilton last month.

Original Story Below:

Why am I not surprised? It looks like the National Enquirer stayed on the case after rabid denials from John Edwards concerning his alleged affair with hired Edwards documentarian Rielle Hunter. The national Enquirer also claimed in December of 2007 that Hunter was pregnant with the Democrat Senator’s child.

Yesterday and then again today the Enquirer updated the story with more proof that Edwards is running around with Hunter and secretly meeting in a Los Angeles hotel with both her and the child he allegedly fathered.

Vice Presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards was caught visiting his mistress and secret love child at 2:40 this morning in a Los Angeles hotel by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

The married ex-senator from North Carolina - whose wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer — met with his mistress, blonde divorcée Rielle Hunter, at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night, July 21 - and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER was there! He didn’t leave until early the next morning.

The details get even yummier as John Edwards was caught by Enquirer reporters trying to sneak out of the hotel. He fled and hid in the hotel’s basement bathroom where he called security to come and rescue him. What a man.

At 9:45 p.m. (PST) Monday, Edwards appeared at the hotel, and was dropped off at a side entrance. NATIONAL ENQUIRER reporter Alan Butterfield witnessed the ex-senator get out of a BMW driven by a male companion and stroll into the hotel.

Said Butterfield: “Edwards was not carrying anything. He walked in alone. He was wearing a blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was looking around nervously before he entered the hotel.

“Once inside, he interestingly bypassed the lobby and ducked down a side stairs to go to the bottom floor to catch the elevator up - rather than taking the elevator in the main lobby. He went out of his way not to be seen.”

Meanwhile, Rielle had reserved rooms 246 and 252 under the name of the friend who had accompanied her from Santa Barbara, Bob McGovern. Rielle was in one room and McGovern was in another with her baby. This allowed her and Edwards to spend time alone, a source revealed.

Edwards went out of the hotel briefly with Rielle, they were observed by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER and then went back to her room, where he stayed until attempting to sneak out of the hotel unseen at 2:40 a.m. (PST). But when he emerged alone from an elevator into the hotel basement he was greeted by several reporters from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

Senior NATIONAL ENQUIRER Reporter Alexander Hitchen asked Edwards why he was visiting Rielle and whether he was ready to confirm that he was the father of her baby.

Shocked to see a reporter, and without saying anything, Edwards ran up the stairs leading from the hotel basement to the lobby. But, spotting a photographer, he doubled back into the basement. As he emerged from the stairwell, reporter Butterfield questioned him about his hookup with Rielle.

Edwards did not answer and then ran into a nearby restroom. He stayed inside for about 15 minutes, refusing to answer questions from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER about what he was doing in the hotel. A group of hotel security men eventually escorted him from the men’s room, while preventing the NATIONAL ENQUIRER reporters from following him out of the hotel.

Will the mainstream media care? Read all the delicious details here.

The December article claimed the following:

Presidential candidate John Edwards is caught up in a love child scandal, a blockbuster ENQUIRER investigation has discovered.

The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively that Rielle Hunter, a woman linked to Edwards in a cheating scandal earlier this year, is more than six months pregnant — and she’s told a close confidante that Edwards is the father of her baby!

The ENQUIRER’s political bombshell comes just weeks after Edwards emphatically denied having an affair with Rielle, who formerly worked on his campaign and told another close pal that she was romantically involved with the married ex-senator.

The ENQUIRER has now confirmed not only that Rielle is expecting, but that she’s gone into hiding with the help of a former aide to Edwards.

John Edwards also just happens to be on the short list as a potential VP running mate for Barack Obama. No matter though, it’s not as if character has mattered too much for the Obama camp up to this point.

Earlier we had reported on the fallout back in October of 2007. Recall that back then the media came to Mr. Edwards’ defense by taking a pass on the story as is expected of the mainstream media that has lost all credibility as second rate cheerleaders for Democrats running for office. So we are not surprised to learn that the denials were just another in a long line of hypocritical Democrats that talk out of both sides of their mouths.

Original Webloggin article below:

UpdateII:The MSM almost picks up the story as the LA Times covers it in the blog section of the paper. But wait, don’t run there too fast because the link went down almost as fast as it went up.

Still, no proof of an affair but stories that have a lot unexplained cross cutting side stories tend to stay active longer than ones that don’t. Americans love a good conspiracy. Is this a Clinton hit job? Did Edwards really have an affair? Why are web sites disappearing all over the place? Why did Edwards hire a woman with an idea she came up with in a bar and no apparent practical experience to following him around with a camera? All good questions.

Update: (and bump to top) This story gets a little more interesting this evening. Here is the denial from the woman in question:

“The innuendos and lies that have appeared on the internet and in the National Enquirer concerning John Edwards are not true, completely unfounded and ridiculous. My video production company was hired by the Edwards camp on a 6 month contract, which we completed December 31, 2006. When working for the Edwards camp, my conduct as well as the conduct of my entire team was completely professional.

This concocted story is just dirty politics and I want no part of it.” - Rielle Hunter according to MyDD

Now the interesting part of this denial and the story is that the Huffington Post has been reporting that Rielle Hunter was hired to do a video documentary about Edwards and did in fact follow him around on the campaign trail. But for some reason the video and Rielle’s website inexplicably disappeared.

A set of short documentary film “webisodes” made for former Sen. John Edwards prior to his presidential candidacy continues to weave a curious web, this time involving the filmmaker.

The videos, which cost Edwards’ One America Committee $114,461, were produced in 2006 by an aspiring actress/producer named Rielle Hunter, who proposed the idea to the senator in a bar in New York City. The objective was to give viewers - and presumably voters - an authentic look at the North Carolinian. But shortly after Edwards declared his White House aspirations, the footage all but disappeared from public view. After the Huffington Post wrote about the webisodes, the videos resurfaced, both on YouTube and Webcastr.com, although the anonymous individual who reposted them (user name: “MissingVideos”) has not responded to emails.

Little was known about Hunter as well. Despite working in the movie business, she had virtually no Internet presence save for an article in Newsweek about her filming of Edwards and an uninformative IMDB entry for her work on the short film Billy Bob and Them (2000).

This anonymity, it turns out, wasn’t always the case. The Huffington Post has uncovered a deleted website that formerly belonged to Hunter. Titled “Being Is Free,” the site was last updated on April 22, 2007, roughly twenty days after Edwards’ One America Committee made its final payment to Hunter’s company, Midline Groove Productions.

There is virtually no mention of filmmaking or politics on the site. And there is little indication as to what Hunter did professionally - beyond an involvement in various spiritual quests - before she and her partner, Mimi Hockman, started Midline Groove Production in the spring of 2006. As Colin Weil, a consultant to the Edwards webisodes told the Huffington Post: “Neither of them had done tons and tons of stuff before hand… The whole [Edwards' taping] was pretty organic.”

On the deleted pages, the 44-year-old Hunter (formerly known as Lisa Druck) discusses her former hard partying days, her search for enlightenment, and her issues with drugs and debt. There is a 2005 interview she did with one-time boyfriend Jay McInerney, in which the celebrated novelist reveals that Hunter was the basis for Alison Poole, the main character of his book, Story of My Life.

A lot of things are not adding up about this story. Sure, this could all be a bad coincidence and I don’t even know for sure if the MyDD denial is legit (what on MyDD is?) In any respect this looks a bit worse for Edwards than I originally thought. Before it was just a story based on a flimsy e-mail. But now the situation seems to be getting downright ugly, missing videos, disappearing websites, drugs, debt…. Hmmm.

Original Story Below
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October 10, 2007 Article in The National Enquirer

It doesn’t take long for the press to come out with all cylinders running when a Republican is accused of any sort of sex story, be it the stall to stall romancing of Larry Craig or the nighttime madame phone calls of David Vitter. Yep, the newsrooms of the mainstream media have plenty of boilerplate material for such stories. Put the shoe on the other foot such as the allegation that Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards had an 18 month affair with a former campaign worker however and you can pretty much expect that more important items take precedent.

Take for example the Washington Post front page article and video coverage of Muslim athletes that endure the demands of fasting during Ramadan. The New York Times is too busy giving face time to the anti-semitic Jimmy Carter so he can bash the U.S. even more in his current anti-Cheney tour. (side note, Carter appeared on CNN yesterday with Wolf Blitzer on the Situation Room to counsel us on the dangers of bombing Iran). The La Times covers the self made “controversy” over the new Star Trek movie.

The stars are pretty much aligned for a press club that exceedingly displays its one sided agenda; a mission to distort the news rather than do something novel such as report the news.

Yes, the source of the story on the John Edwards affair is The National Enquirer and many will play that down. But the story is not about the platform of the exposes’ but rather that a back to back Democratic Presidential candidate with a penchant for expensive haircuts is alleged to have had an 18 month affair on the campaign trail. Imagine that.

Presidential candidate John Edwards is caught in a shocking mistress scandal that could wreck his campaign, The NATIONAL ENQUIRER has learned exclusively.

Sources have come forward to charge that the “other woman” previously worked on Edwards’ campaign and followed the 54-year-old candidate on trips across the U.S.

A source close to the woman, whose name is being withheld by The NATIONAL ENQUIRER, says that she confessed to having an affair in phone calls and emails, saying that her work with Edwards soon exploded into romance. The shocking allegation — if proven true — could devastate the Democratic hopeful’s campaign, especially because John’s devoted wife Elizabeth is locked in a desperate battle with breast cancer.

“The affair started about 18 months ago,” a friend says the woman confessed to her. “When they met at a bar, sparks flew immediately.

I see nothing in the Enquirer piece that points to any concrete evidence. But I do find it interesting that the woman making these claims is a former campaign worker for John Edwards. Usually former co-workers and subordinates are allowed a bit more latitude in the credibility of their claims, at least if they are the type to claim that a future Supreme Court Justice with a tendency to lean conservative is harassing her.

Only time will tell if this story bears fruit. Don’t expect the major media to do any footwork on it though; after all, we’re not talking about an end run on Rush Limbaugh. I think we need something a little more concrete than the flimsy evidence of a woman’s e-mail to her friends otherwise it is nothing more than a smear job. Let’s wait and see what the MSM comes up with, enquiring minds want to know.