Well, good. Someone else smells the stench.
Neither Ruth Marcus, in her editorial for the Washington Post, nor I, think the prosecution of John Edwards in a matter than begs credulity has legs to stand on. And that despite the fact that we use the same words in describing Edwards as "pond scum."
In the middle of his campaign, Edwards asked a couple of his biggest backers and asked them to take care of the woman with whom he'd fathered a child.
Was that a contribution to the Edwards campaign, in which case it would be illegal because it was not reported as such and exceeded the allowable contribution limits? That’s a stretch.
The campaign finance law defines a contribution as “any gift . . . loan, advance, or deposit of money or anything of value made by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for federal office.” But as the Supreme Court has noted, that expansive definition must have some limits. If I lend my daughter money so she can volunteer for a political campaign, that’s not an illegal contribution to the campaign. If a friend of a candidate offers to underwrite her addict son’s stay in rehab during the campaign, that is not an illegal contribution, even if it has the benefit of keeping the errant youth out of the public eye.
In a 2000 advisory opinion, the Federal Election Commission concluded that a Washington business executive could not give $10,000 checks to favored candidates to compensate them for “forgoing opportunities in the private sector.” The commissioners concluded that “payment by a third person of a candidate’s personal expenses during the campaign would be considered a contribution by the third person . . . to that candidate, unless the payment would be made irrespective of the candidacy.” But in the Edwards situation, the money did not go to the candidate himself and it came from people with whom he had prior relationships.
My own question was about the probity of the people within the Department of Justice who were setting out to prosecute Edwards at a time when the campaign contributions problems were much more serious in other cases and when DOJ has a backlog of very serious issues to deal with. Marcus addresses the question: who the hell is behind this? The answer is George Holding, the US Attorney in Edwards' home state -- North Carolina.
I don’t like questioning prosecutors’ motives, but the interrelationships in the Edwards case are unsettling. Unlike most U.S. attorneys in the Obama administration, Holding is a Republican holdover. Named to the job by George W. Bush, he was an aide to the late Republican Sen. Jesse Helms and a law clerk for federal judge Terrence Boyle, another former Helms aide whose elevation to the appeals court was blocked by . . . one John Edwards, back when he was a senator.
The larger campaign finance system is in shambles, with gushers of undisclosed money poised to pour into the 2012 campaign. Meanwhile, the Justice Department spends its energies — two years and counting — going after Edwards? This use of resources is, I am astonished to say, enough to make me feel some sympathy for him.
Ms. Marcus, we agree. I had the same reaction. The real story here is not John Edwards but corruption within Ashcroft's and Gonzales' Department of Justice. We expected it to be cleaned up in the Obama administration. Far from it.
