Edwards’ contacts with witnesses raises red flags

Witness tampering allegations appear to be the rage these days.  Yesterday, the Anchorage Daily News detailed allegations that prosecutors covered up tampering attempts by one of their star witnesses in their corruption cases.  Today, the Charlotte Observer reports that John Edwards has used the private jet of a potential witness in an investigation of misuse of campaign funds, and that could raise serious legal issues for the former Democratic VP nominee:

On Friday, a Raleigh TV station showed Edwards at the Raleigh-Durham airport walking off a plane belonging to Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, a wealthy heiress who supported the former Democrat’s presidential candidate’s campaign.

Flight records showed the plane flew from RDU to the private airstrip at Mellon’s northern Virginia home. In 2008 Mellon’s holding company gave $3.48 million to Alliance for a New America, a 527 group tied to Edwards’ presidential campaign. Prosecutors investigating Edwards have talked to Mellon’s attorneys.

The grand jury is investigating whether Edwards used campaign money to cover up an affair with mistress Rielle Hunter. Charlotte lawyer Ken Bell, a former federal prosecutor, said Edwards’ flight could cause an appearance problem, if not legal.

“It would create a danger of being accused of trying to influence a witness or obstruct justice,” he said. “It’s dangerous and perhaps inadvisable, but not necessarily illegal.”

Politico reported Monday that Andrew Young, the former aide who once claimed to be the father of Hunter’s baby, is alleging that Mellon paid some of Hunter’s bills. It’s unclear whether Mellon herself has talked to prosecutors.

Edwards faces a grand jury investigation into alleged payoffs from campaign funds to his mistress, Rielle Hunter, who gave birth to Edwards’ child.  While that investigation is ongoing, contacts between targets and potential witnesses are usually considered suspicious.  Edwards certainly has the money to buy his own first-class plane tickets.  He doesn’t need Mellon’s jet to get him from Point A to Point B, which makes the contact and the favor even more suspicious.

The Observer has stuck with the Edwards story, even though the national media has all but ignored it.  Instead, they have tried to chase down the mistresses of Tiger Woods, making that a news-leading story day after day.  John Ziegler has been sharply critical of Woods, but points out the vastly different treatment of Woods and Edwards by the media:

By far the worst offender here has been NBC and specifically, the Today Show (a program, which, for the record, I have appeared on, and criticized, previously).

Monday, for the second straight show, they had on one of Tiger’s mistresses, live, in studio, for extended segments. Last Friday, the Tiger lover in question was also on Dateline NBC under an arrangement that certainly appeared to include NBC indirectly paying for the interview.

Now, what exactly was the “news’ value in either of these interviews? Tiger Woods is not a politician, or even a priest. There is no allegation of a crime here. No indication that any public funds were used to support the affairs. Tiger Woods is simply a sports celebrity who had already admitted that he has been a really lousy husband before the Today Show agreed to put these women on national television during alleged “news” programs. …

But perhaps the most remarkable analogy which proves the absurdity of NBC’s Tiger coverage is the comparison to how the John Edwards story was handled.

Edwards was running for PRESIDENT when he had a love child with a woman on his campaign payroll while his wife was dying of cancer. The National Enquirer ran a FAR more substantial story revealing this reality and the reaction of the rest of the media (“news” and otherwise) was complete silence. There were no satellite trucks parked outside the Edwards home forcing him to stay out of the public eye. There was no attempt to pressure the mistress into coming forward. There were no offers of money and “fame” to anyone else who simply claimed to have ever had sex with Edwards.

Maybe if the news media took as much interest in the hypocrisy, disloyalty, and potential corruption of a public official as they do in the sexual antics of a professional athlete, they may have caught Edwards taking favors from a potential witness in the grand jury investigation.  That seems like actual news.  The fact that an attractive multimillionaire athlete committed perhaps dozens of sexual indiscretions and infidelities is a dog-bites-man story to everyone but the athlete’s wife.  Instead, we get daily focus on the latter story, eleven reporters assigned to dissect a political memoir by another VP candidate, and no one but the local media reporting on a story of alleged payoffs by a politician from campaign coffers to keep his squeaky-clean Two Americas image burnished.

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