Washington, August 15 : As tabloid reports of a sex scandal threatened former Senator John Edwards’ presidential campaign last December on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, two lawyers surfaced with written statements that appeared to absolve the candidate of the charges.
One of them, Robert J Gordon of New York, said that his client, Rielle Hunter, a pregnant 43-year-old filmmaker, was not carrying Edwards’ child. Shortly thereafter, the other lawyer, Pamela J Marple of Washington, sent word that her client, Andrew Young was the baby’s father. He is an Edwards campaign aide. The statements of the lawyers’ appear to deflate the anonymously sourced reports of an Edwards tryst. But what went unnoticed was that the two lawyers share an important connection to Edwards that raises questions about whether they were part of an orchestrated effort to protect him. The lawyers are linked through Fred Baron, a wealthy Dallas lawyer and former finance chairman for the Edwards campaign. While Gordon has worked with Baron on class-action personal injury cases, Marple helped defend a lawsuit brought against both men and their law firms by an asbestos manufacturer.
After initially saying that he did not know how the lawyers were chosen to represent Hunter and Young, Baron acknowledged that he might have played a role. But he has since offered conflicting explanations about his involvement in arranging for the two lawyers to step in and effectively defuse an accusation that threatened to derail Edwards’ political career.
Meanwhile, a review found that Edwards’ political action committee went to unusual lengths to make a final $14,000 payment to Hunter’s film company months after its contract with the committee had ended. Hunter’s work for the political action committee involved making short videos of Edwards. But three months after the end of contract, on April 1, 2007, the committee made another payment of $14,086, which coincided with the receipt of $14,035 by the committee from Edwards’ presidential campaign to cover the cost of office furniture, according to Federal Election Commission reports. This payment was issued while the committee was short on cash and could pay its bills only after receiving thousands of dollars from Edwards’ presidential campaign
