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Edwards' ally explains $14,000 payment to mistress
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-08-15 15:12

Legal experts said it was important for Edwards to demonstrate the political action committee wasn't paying Hunter merely to keep quiet about the affair.

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"One thing that's possible is that she was still owed money from what she'd done before for the political action committee, but obviously there are less charitable explanations," said Richard Hasen, a professor specializing in campaign finance law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Edwards insisted during an interview Aug. 8 that he broke off the affair and confessed his infidelity to wife Elizabeth in 2006. But Hunter appeared at campaign events in the final days of December. One such event was his formal campaign announcement in New Orleans, which Elizabeth did not attend.

Edwards said several times in his interview with ABC News the affair was short-lived.

But there is evidence that Edwards and Hunter spent months together in 2006, traveling the world and the country as he prepared for his second run for the White House.

One of Hunter's friends, Pigeon O'Brien, told the AP that Hunter told her the affair with "John from North Carolina," who was married to a woman who had been seriously ill, began in March 2006. That conflicts with Edwards' statement the affair started only after he hired Hunter to produce several videos for his Web site, the first payment for which came in July 2006.

Hunter and a business partner founded Midline Groove in June 2006.

Edwards said last week he did not plan to speak again about the affair, and a former campaign official who has been acting as a spokeswoman reiterated this week he will not discuss the subject. It's not clear where Hunter is currently living, and a woman who answered at her attorney's office this week refused to take a message.