John Edwards’ political action committee paid his mistress, party girl , $14,000 after she stopped working for it to obtain 100 hours of unused videotape she had shot for his unsuccessful presidential campaign, an associate disclosed to The Associated Press on Thursday. 

Rielle Hunter, already had been paid $100,000 for the programs which raises even more questions and suspicions as to the exact nature of the relationship and exactly when it ceased. If, in fact it ever did! 

The explanation - which Edwards’ advisers declined to discuss on the record - is the first effort to justify the payment in April 2007 to Hunter. That payment came months before Edwards’ chief fundraiser quietly began sending money himself to the pregnant woman. 

It is becoming increasingly apparent that there is much more to the affair and the attempts to keep it “under wraps” before the media outing it and now afterwards as Edwards and friends try to initiate damage control. 

The majority of those following the unraveling of events, including the Edwards interview on Nightline, believe that Edwards was and still is either lying or holding back many details of his affair with Hunter. 

Last week he acknowledged he had an affair with Hunter in 2006 and  denied any knowledge of those payments to Hunter from Fred Baron, Edwards’ national finance chairman and a wealthy Dallas-based trial attorney. Baron also has described his payments to Hunter as a private transaction. 

But the $14,000 payment to Hunter is significant because its source was Edwards’ OneAmerica political action committee, whose expenditures are governed by U.S. election laws. Willfully converting money from a political action committee for personal use would have been a federal criminal violation. 

Are they expecting that this lame but very convenient explanation is going to hold up to serious scrutiny? 

Edwards insisted during an interview Aug. 8 that he broke off the affair and confessed his infidelity to wife Elizabeth in 2006. But Hunter appeared at campaign events in the final days of December. One such event was his formal campaign announcement in New Orleans, which Elizabeth did not attend. 

Edwards said several times in his interview with ABC News the affair was short-lived but there is evidence that Edwards and Hunter spent months together in 2006, traveling the world and the country as he prepared for his second run for the White House.

Celebrity news programs are still closely following the story of Edwards’ affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter, talking with friends and family members in an effort to poke holes in the one-time presidential candidate’s statements.

In its latest issue, People magazine reports that "behind the public show of strength, the Edwards’ household has been a scene of turmoil and tension" since John Edwards announced last Friday he had had an extramarital affair with Hunter in 2006. 

One of Hunter’s friends, Pigeon O’Brien, told the AP that Hunter told her the affair with "John from North Carolina," who was married to a woman who had been seriously ill, began in March 2006. That conflicts with Edwards’ statement the affair started only after he hired Hunter to produce several videos for his Web site, the first payment for which came in July 2006. 

Edwards said last week he did not plan to speak again about the affair, and a former campaign official who has been acting as a spokeswoman reiterated this week he will not discuss the subject. It’s not clear where Hunter is currently living, and a woman who answered at her attorney’s office this week refused to take a message. 

Hunter’s sister, reached at her home in Nevada, also refused to comment.

Edwards has denied Hunter was paid to cover up the affair, and said he had no knowledge that Baron was sending money to both her and a married Edwards staffer who later claimed to be the father of Hunter’s daughter. She was born in February 2008. 

"The bottom line to it is John Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards had no knowledge of anything I did," Baron said. "I did it as a friend." 

However, let us remember that there is a child that was born amid all of these events and that child is not going to disappear, especially in light of the questions of paternity which are being thwarted by Hunter’s refusal to allow testing. The name of the father, seen here, is still left blank on the child’s Birth Certificate. 

Editorial Note: History has clearly taught us that it is always the cover-up of the crimes or mistakes, as the Edwards affair is being characterized, that causes the greatest damage and continues to breathe life into the story not allowing it to die a natural death. The beginning of the end does not start until the whole truth is told. Don’t they get that?  

PIGEON O’BRIEN INTERVIEW           
   

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