John Edwards Affair? | Enquirer, Part-Owned By Clinton Backer Says John Edwards In An Affair In 2006?

UPDATE: JOHN EDWARDS CAUGHT VISITING RIELLE HUNTER AND CHILD JULY 21, 2008.

FLASH: Clinton Campaign head sticks foot in mouth in Iowa.

FLASH: Barack Obama and African American fear of success.

Video UPDATE:



This is one of those stories you aren't sure what to do with but figure you should cover to some extent. Apparently the National Enquirer is reporting that John Edwards had been cheating on his wife. It's all the more hurtful because his wife's battling breast cancer and doesn't need any more stress, even from the mere existence of the story itself.

Yikes.

The person who some are pointing fingers at is named Rielle Hunter. She's a video producer who was hired to cover Edwards for a period of time during the campaign and made a special set of videos. Here's one of them..




Hunter released the following statement through a spokesperson:

"The innuendoes 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."

But how in hell did this get started and generate 1,363 blog posts, according to Technorati? We'll get to that, but it appears the National Enquirer is part owned by Clinton backer and former staffer Roger Altman , according to Pat Dollard.

But A spokesman for American Media, Richard Valvo, said in an email that Altman has “no involvement in editorial, ever.” He said that Evercore owns 20% of the company through an investment fund. Altman didn’t respond to an email seeking comment or to a message left with his secretary.

American Media has also published terrible and negative stories about the Clintons since its acquisition, so that may just be coincidence.

But how did this get started?

According to Sam Stein over at the Huffington Post , the two met at a New York Bar (!) and the idea for a set of videos was hatched there. What Sam doesn't report, but does come from Rielle's own website, is that in 2004 she was flat broke. In 2006, just two years later, she scored a six-figure deal with Edwards. But how?

What appears possible is that Edwards got involved with helping a woman in her early 40s remake her life. Indeed, the production company that made the film, Midline Groove Productions, was brand new in 2006, according to its website.

"Midline Groove is a full-service production company committed to projects that reveal truth -- the authentic aspects of humanity that are right here and most often overlooked. Creating short and feature length documentaries for the web, broadcast, and big screen, the company was established in 2006 by producing partners Rielle Hunter and Mimi Hockman."

So it seems that the Edward project was Midline Groove Productions' first work, period. Thus it seems as if Edwards created a job for the new production company. It came at the right time for Hunter. Hunter's other website sends the constant message that Hunter was searching for a new self at the time. Check this out..

Back in bed the thought arises: Funny, I would ask Ramana for help and not Gangaji who is here in a body. Yes, that would be too intimate. Intimate intimate intimate. And because I have learned to move towards my fear, I have learned that under the fear is where all the great juice is hidden, it naturally occurs to me to ask her: Gangaji, PLEASE help me wake up from this dream.

There's a lot of text like that.

NYMag has a great timeline which I've reproduced here:



January 2007. John Edwards's One America campaign debuts a series of Web videos about him, made by relatively unknown documentarian Rielle Hunter. The pair met at a bar, where she sold the future candidate on the idea. Hunter subsequently followed Edwards around the country, filming. Newsweek reporter Jonathan Darman, upon watching the final cuts, notes that "in the midst of a short theme sequence that begins each Webisode, the camera lingers over the former senator's behind as he tucks a starched white shirt into his pants."

August 27, 2007. The Post's "Page Six" runs the following blind item: "WHICH political candidate enjoys visiting New York because he has a girlfriend who lives downtown? The pol tells her he'll marry her when his current wife is out of the picture." This is later reprinted by commenters on the Huffington Post blog.

September 26, 2007. Young Huffington Post blogger Sam Stein writes about his efforts to track down the Web videos, which have disappeared from Edwards's Website. Stein writes an oddly detailed account of his chase of the videos and points out that both the Edwards campaign and Hunter's production company blame one another for their vanishing act. Stein even checks with the Screen Actor's Guild to get more information and tracks down production assistants on the project, none of whom will say much. Finally, Edwards's people let him see the videos while accompanied by a campaign minder and Stein sees nothing sinister in them.

September 27, 2007. Daily Kos contributor Ben Bang links to Stein's post and viciously berates the reporter. "Are we supposed to infer something from this non-ending, douchebag?" Ben Bang asks, going on to call him a him a "no-article-finishing, character-assassinating hack fuck."

October 10, 2007. The National Enquirer reports that Edwards is having an affair with a mystery woman who had traveled with the campaign and met the candidate at a bar. An Edwards rep calls the allegations "false, absolute nonsense."

October 10, 2007. That same day, Stein posts a follow-up to his original Huffington Post piece. He questions why the filmmaker, Rielle Hunter, was paid upwards of $100,000 for her work and points out that she used to be a party girl who dated writer Jay McInerney in the eighties and inspired the main character in his book Story of My Life.

October 10, 2007. Ann Coulter, late in the day, mentions the Enquirer story on Tucker Carlson's MSNBC talk show. Daily Kos once again picks up on it and lists the reasons why Stein and the Huffington Post are irresponsible journalists for digging into it.

October 11, 2007. Mickey Kaus on Slate writes a post headlined "Emerging Edwards Scandal?" in which he notes the previous coverage, mulls what would happen to Edwards's campaign if the story were true, especially since he's been "tacitly and effectively used Elizabeth and her struggle" with cancer (the struggle with cancer no doubt being a large part of why the "mainstream media seems to be strenuously trying to not report it"), and wonders who might benefit. Obama?

October 11, 2007. Jezebel.com doesn't mince words, with a headline that screams, "Is John Edwards Cheating on His Cancer-Stricken Wife?" "Who the fuck sleeps with a married man whose wife has terminal cancer and THE ENTIRE WORLD FUCKING KNOWS ABOUT IT?"

October 11, 2007. Washington, D.C., gossip blog Wonkette.com picks up on the Enquirer story, too. After Ann Coulter (who once called John Edwards a gay slur) mentions it, they query: "But, um, Ann? Why would Edwards have a lady-affair when he's a 'faggot'?"

October 11, 2007. New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer dutifully compiles all of the coverage of the rumor, without adding any information or making conclusions of any kind.

The AP Picks Up The Story

The Associated Press just picked up the story as did the LA Times. In total, 70 news outlets are running with the yarn. Let's see where this takes us as it's not going away.

TED SORENSEN - President Kennedy's Aide Compares JFK To Barack Obama - From New Republic Online

Is Barack Obama the next JFK?

Heir Time

by Ted Sorensen
Post date: 07.19.07
Issue date: 07.23.07

t first glance, the Democratic nominee for president in 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy--the millionaire Caucasian war hero for whom I worked for eleven golden years--seems notably different from the most interesting candidate for next year's nomination, Senator Barack Obama. But when does a difference make a difference? Different times, issues, and electors make any meaningful comparison unlikely. But the parallels in their candidacies are striking.

Fifty years ago, Kennedy and I embarked on a period in which we traveled to all 50 states in his long, uphill quest for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. He was, like Obama, a first-term U.S. senator. But he was not yet 40 years old, making Obama, already 45, a geezer by comparison.

At the time, Washington pundits assumed Kennedy had at least two insurmountable obstacles. The first was his lack of experience, especially compared with the senior statesmen also seeking that nomination-- Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, and Stuart Symington. Kennedy acknowledged that his age and inexperience would turn away some voters. Obama, though older than Kennedy, is similarly dismissed by some today. But Kennedy noted in one speech that "experience is like tail-lights on a boat which illuminate where we have been when we should be focusing on where we should be going."



TED SORENSEN - PHOTO

Kennedy's second major obstacle was his heritage. Some said he had lost his chance to be president of the United States the day he was born--or, at least, the day he was baptized as a Roman Catholic. No Catholic had ever been elected president of the United States, and the overwhelming defeat suffered by the only Catholic nominated for that position, Governor Al Smith of New York in 1928, had persuaded subsequent Democratic leaders that it would be hopeless ever to risk that route again.

The conviction that no Catholic could win was greater, in that less enlightened era 50 years ago, than the widespread assumption today that a black presidential candidate cannot win. The subtly bigoted phrase most often repeated in that election year--by former President Harry Truman, among others--was that 1960 was "too early" for a Catholic president, that the country was "not ready," and that Kennedy should be a "good sport" by settling for the vice presidency. No doubt Obama will hear--or has already heard--similar sentiments about the color of his skin.

Even some Catholic religious leaders--who thought Kennedy was not Catholic enough, having attended secular schools and expressed disagreement with the Catholic hierarchy on church-state separation--opposed his candidacy. So did some Catholic political leaders who thought his candidacy might raise unwanted controversies or produce an unwanted rival to their own positions (much as Al Sharpton and Vernon Jordan may not initially welcome an Obama candidacy). But, in time, Kennedy's speeches and interviews strongly favoring traditional church-state separation reassured all but the most bigoted anti-Catholics. In the end, despite his ethnic handicap, Kennedy proved to be less divisive than his major opponent, fellow senator Hubert Humphrey. Obama may prove the same.

In addition to their similar handicaps, Kennedy and Obama share an extraordinary number of parallels. Both men were Harvard-educated. Both rose to national attention almost overnight as the result of starring roles at the nationally televised Democratic convention preceding their respective candidacies: Kennedy in 1956, when he delivered the speech nominating Stevenson and subsequently came close to winning an open-floor struggle for the vice presidential nomination with Estes Kefauver; Obama in 2004, by virtue of his brilliant speech to the convention that year in Boston.

Both also gained national acclaim through their best-selling inspirational books--Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, published in 1956, and Obama's The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006. Both men immediately stood out as young, handsome, and eloquent new faces who attracted and excited ever larger and younger crowds at the grassroots level, a phenomenon that initially went almost unnoticed by Washington leaders and experts too busy interviewing themselves.

Kennedy's speeches in early 1960 and even earlier, like Obama's in early 2007, were not notable for their five-point legislative plans. Rather, they focused on several common themes: hope, a determination to succeed despite the odds, dissatisfaction with the status quo, and confidence in the judgment of the American people. In sprinkling their remarks with allusions to history and poetry, neither talked down to the American people. JFK was so frank about his disagreements with the leadership of his Catholic "base" that one Catholic journal editorialized against him; Obama was equally frank and courageous with the Democrats' organized labor base in assessing the competitive prospects of the American auto industry in Detroit. Both were unsparing in their references to the "revolving door" culture in Washington.

On foreign policy, both emphasized the importance of multilateral demo- cracy, national strength as a guardian of peace, and the need to restore America's global standing, moral authority, and leadership. Both warned of the dangers of war: Kennedy motivated by his own harsh experience in World War II, Obama by his familiarity with suffering in all parts of the world. Both were cerebral rather than emotional speakers, relying on the communication of values and hope rather than cheap applause lines.

Perhaps most tellingly, both preached (and personified) the politics of hope in contrast to the politics of fear, which characterized Republican speeches during their respective eras. In 1960 and earlier, cynics and pessimists accepted the ultimate inevitability of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, much as today they assume a fruitless and unending war against terrorism. Hope trumped fear in 1960, and I have no doubt that it will again in 2008.



lthough President Kennedy became the breakthrough president on civil rights, health care, and other liberal issues, he was not the most liberal candidate for the nomination in 1960. His emphasis on the importance of ethics, moral courage, and a multilateral foreign policy made him--like Obama--hard to pigeonhole with a single ideological label. His insistence that the United States "must do better" in every sphere of activity, including its cold war competition with the Soviet Union, caused some historians to mistakenly recall that he "ran to the right" of Richard Nixon on national security issues, forgetting his emphasis on negotiations and peaceful solutions.

JFK's establishment opponents-- probably not unlike Obama's--did not understand Kennedy's appeal. "Find out his secret," LBJ instructed one of his aides sent to spy on the Kennedy camp, "his strategy, his weaknesses, his comings and goings." Ultimately, Kennedy was both nominated and elected, not by secretly outspending or out-gimmicking his opponents but by outworking and out-thinking them, especially by attracting young volunteers and first-time voters. Most of Kennedy's opponents, like Obama's, were fellow senators--Johnson, Humphrey, and Symington--who initially dismissed him as neither a powerhouse on the Senate floor nor a member of their inner circle. That mattered not to the voters; nor does it today.

Above all, after eight years out of power and two bitter defeats, Democrats in 1960, like today, wanted a winner--and Kennedy, despite his supposed handicaps, was a winner. On civil rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the race to the moon, and other issues, President Kennedy succeeded by demonstrating the same courage, imagination, compassion, judgment, and ability to lead and unite a troubled country that he had shown during his presidential campaign. I believe Obama will do the same.

Ted Sorensen worked with John F. Kennedy for eleven years, first as his senatorial assistant and then in the White House as his special counsel and adviser. He is presently working on his memoirs, to be published in 2008.

What John F. Kennedy Would Say To George Bush

This video presents what the late JFK may have said to current President Bush regarding matters of secrecy.