Edwards' ally explains $14,000 payment to mistress

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-08-15 15:12

WASHINGTON - John Edwards' political action committee paid his mistress $14,000 after she stopped working for it to obtain 100 hours of unused videotape she had shot for his unsuccessful presidential campaign, an associate said on Thursday.

In this undated image rendered from video and provided by Extra, Rielle Hunter is shown during an interview. Edwards' political action committee paid $100,000 in a four-month span to a newly formed firm run by Rielle Hunter, who directed the production of four Web videos. [Agencies]

The woman, Rielle Hunter, already had been paid $100,000 for the programs.

The explanation - which Edwards' advisers declined to discuss on the record - is the first effort to justify the payment in April 2007 to Hunter. That payment came months before Edwards' chief fundraiser quietly began sending money himself to the pregnant woman.

Edwards last week acknowledged he had an affair with Hunter in 2006. The former Democratic presidential contender and senator from North Carolina has denied any knowledge of those payments to Hunter from Fred Baron, Edwards' national finance chairman and a wealthy Dallas-based trial attorney. Baron also has described his payments to Hunter as a private transaction.

But the $14,000 payment to Hunter is significant because its source was Edwards' OneAmerica political action committee, whose expenditures are governed by US election laws. Willfully converting money from a political action committee for personal use would have been a federal criminal violation.

An associate of Edwards, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the $14,000 was paid to Hunter only after she relinquished about 100 hours of cutting-room floor videotape excerpts that were not part of four short Web videos she had produced for Midline Groove Ltd. in 2006.

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