CCP co-founder and Vice President Stephen Hoersting has an article today in National Review Online discussing the John Edwards scandal in regards to media coverage and the long-term impact on campaign finance law:
The basis of the charges is that one of Edwards’s campaign contributors provided additional funds to hide and support Rielle Hunter. The government calls those additional funds excessive campaign contributions designed to hide Hunter to save Edwards’s campaign. Edwards contends they were personal gifts designed to hide Hunter to save his marriage to Elizabeth Edwards. This difference is at the heart of the case.
While most experts think the government’s case is a stretch, campaign “reformers” at Common Cause have praised the indictment as “a welcome statement about the Justice Department’s commitment to strict enforcement of our campaign laws.”
J. Gerald Hebert, a senior reformer with the Campaign Legal Center, was out early in televised interviews hosted by Brian Ross of ABC News. Ross has aided reformers before, transmitting the meme that Tom DeLay’s political maneuvers were better viewed as crimes.
Hebert conceded in the interview that the first thing the government would have to prove is that the money “paid to [Hunter] was done for the purpose of influencing the election,” which would make the funds “contributions” (illegal and excessive ones), not gifts.
The government’s case sinks or soars on the charge that Edwards’s desire to hide his mistress would not have existed “irrespective of” his candidacy, the standard that marks the line between campaign use of funds and personal use. But any layman knows that charge isn’t true. The desire to hide a mistress would exist whether Edwards was running for president, serving as senator, or trying cases as an attorney.
Later, Hoersting notes:
The government is counting on the seamy optics of a personal affair to win a campaign-finance conviction. Good men and women have been convicted on less. But if campaign-finance violations are the allegation, the seamy nature of the disbursements should acquit Edwards, not convict him.
The whole article is a must read.
