John Edwards Indicted

DEMOCRAT John Edwards has been indicted.

From the New York Times:

John Edwards, the former Democratic senator from North Carolina, was indicted Friday morning by a grand jury in Raleigh on charges that he conspired to cover up an extramarital affair while running for president in 2008 by “secretly obtaining,” misusing and misreporting certain campaign contributions in violation of federal law.

According to the indictment, Mr. Edwards, 57, knew that word of the affair and the child that it produced would destroy his campaign because, it said, “a centerpiece of Edwards’s candidacy was his public image as a devoted family man.”

Mr. Edwards plans to plead not guilty to the charges at his arraignment at 2:30 Friday in federal court in Winston-Salem, N.C., before Magistrate Judge Patrick Auld.

...The indictment says Mr. Edwards and his co-conspirators solicited $725,000 from Rachel Mellon, the now-century-old heiress to the Mellon banking fortune, and $200,000 from Fred Baron, Mr. Edwards’s campaign finance chairman. Both amounts, it says, were well in excess of the limit of $2,300 that an individual can give. According to the indictment, the money went to hide Rielle Hunter, Mr. Edwards’s mistress and the mother of his child, from the news media and to pay for her medical expenses, travel and accommodations. The grand jury, which has been investigating the case for two years, indicted Mr. Edwards on six counts — one involving conspiracy, four involving illegal payments, and one involving false statements. If he is found guilty, Mr. Edwards faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count. “Mr. Edwards is alleged to have accepted more than $900,000 in an effort to conceal from the public facts that he believed would harm his candidacy,” Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer said in a statement. “As this indictment shows, we will not permit candidates for high office to abuse their special ability to access the coffers of their political supporters to circumvent our election laws.”

I suppose DEMOCRAT Anthony Weiner is hoping that the DEMOCRAT John Edwards scandal wipes his scandal off the front page.

I think the country is capable of managing two scandals at once.