WWJD?-John Edwards Style

[DKW 86 7,450]

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/sen_john_e...celebrity/65193

I would say I was shocked, but I am not. The Breck Girl is just too easy to shoot to pieces. What an A--HOLE!

SEN. JOHN EDWARDS CAUGHT WITH MISTRESS AND LOVE CHILD!

Vice Presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards was caught visiting his mistress and secret love child at 2:40 this morning in a Los Angeles hotel by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

The married ex-senator from North Carolina - whose wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer -- met with his mistress, blonde divorcée Rielle Hunter, at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night, July 21 - and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER was there! He didn't leave until early the next morning.

Rielle had driven to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara with a male friend for the rendezvous with Edwards. The former senator attended a press event Monday afternoon with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the topic of how to combat homelessness.

But a months-long NATIONAL ENQUIRER investigation had yielded information that Rielle and Edwards, 54, had arranged to secretly meet afterward and for the ex-senator to spend some time with both his mistress and the love child who he refuses to publicly acknowledge as his own.

The NATIONAL ENQUIRER broke the story of Edwards' love child scandal last year, when Rielle was still pregnant and Edwards was still considered a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Both parties denied the NATIONAL ENQUIRER report and a close friend of Edwards' came forward and said he was the father of Rielle's baby. But sources told the NATIONAL ENQUIRER a far different story - they revealed that Edwards was engineering a massive cover up of his shocking infidelity.

Sources came forward after that story appeared and told The NATIONAL ENQUIRER that Edwards and Rielle had met secretly several times, so that he could see his baby and continue his relationship with Rielle.

The NATIONAL ENQUIRER learned ahead of time that one such meeting was set for yesterday.

At 9:45 p.m. (PST) Monday, Edwards appeared at the hotel, and was dropped off at a side entrance. NATIONAL ENQUIRER reporter Alan Butterfield witnessed the ex-senator get out of a BMW driven by a male companion and stroll into the hotel.

Said Butterfield: "Edwards was not carrying anything. He walked in alone. He was wearing a blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was looking around nervously before he entered the hotel.

"Once inside, he interestingly bypassed the lobby and ducked down a side stairs to go to the bottom floor to catch the elevator up - rather than taking the elevator in the main lobby. He went out of his way not to be seen."

Meanwhile, Rielle had reserved rooms 246 and 252 under the name of the friend who had accompanied her from Santa Barbara, Bob McGovern. Rielle was in one room and McGovern was in another with her baby. This allowed her and Edwards to spend time alone, a source revealed.

Edwards went out of the hotel briefly with Rielle, they were observed by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER and then went back to her room, where he stayed until attempting to sneak out of the hotel unseen at 2:40 a.m. (PST). But when he emerged alone from an elevator into the hotel basement he was greeted by several reporters from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

Senior NATIONAL ENQUIRER Reporter Alexander Hitchen asked Edwards why he was visiting Rielle and whether he was ready to confirm that he was the father of her baby.

Shocked to see a reporter, and without saying anything, Edwards ran up the stairs leading from the hotel basement to the lobby. But, spotting a photographer, he doubled back into the basement. As he emerged from the stairwell, reporter Butterfield questioned him about his hookup with Rielle.

Edwards did not answer and then ran into a nearby restroom. He stayed inside for about 15 minutes, refusing to answer questions from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER about what he was doing in the hotel. A group of hotel security men eventually escorted him from the men's room, while preventing the NATIONAL ENQUIRER reporters from following him out of the hotel.

Said reporter Hitchen: "After we confronted him about seeing Rielle, Edwards looked like a deer caught in headlights!

"He was clearly surprised that we had caught him at this very late hour inside the hotel.

"Some guests up at this late hour watched the spectacle in amusement from a staircase nearby."

Meanwhile, Rielle's friend McGovern also refused to answer any questions from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER or offer any explanation for her meeting with Edwards.

The Edwards "love child" scandal drew international press attention after the NATIONAL ENQUIRER published a blockbuster investigation about the politician in our Dec. 31, 2007 print edition.

We reported that Rielle, a woman linked to Edwards in a cheating scandal earlier last year, was more than six months pregnant - and we reported that she told a close confidante that Edwards was the father of her baby!

Edwards denied the affair and that he was the father, and in a bizarre twist, a close friend of his, Andrew Young, said he was the father. Young, 41, was married at the time with three children. The NATIONAL ENQUIRER has learned he still is married.

Sources told the NATIONAL ENQUIRER exclusively that Edwards had engineered a massive cover up of the affair and love child scandal and that Young was taking the blame for his good friend. At the time Rielle had been relocated from the New York area to Chapel Hill in Edwards' home state of North Carolina, where she was living in an upscale gated community down the street from Young. Strangely, Young even had Rielle to his house for dinner with his wife and kids, the NATIONAL ENQUIRER has learned.

Young has been extremely close to Edwards for years and was a key official in his presidential campaign.

Rielle is a self-described filmmaker whose company was hired by a pro-Edwards group called One America Committee. She was paid $114,000 to produce videos for Edwards' campaign and worked with him on those videos.

After our story last December, reporters from other media outlets asked Edwards about the report during a campaign stop in Columbia, S.C.

Edwards responded: "The story is false. It's completely untrue, ridiculous," adding: "Anyone who knows me knows that I have been in love with the same woman for 30-plus years."

Rielle issued her own statement, saying in part: "The innuendos and lies that have appeared on the Internet and in the NATIONAL ENQUIRER concerning John Edwards are not true, completely unfounded and ridiculous."

But a source told the NATIONAL ENQUIRER: "Now that it seems to have blown wide open, Rielle may get her wish - all she wants is for John to marry her and for them to live happily ever after with their baby. She's tired of running and living a lie."

A representative for Rielle had no comment on last night's meeting with Edwards.

[pensacola tiger 0]

Hey, I'm by no means a supporter of John Edwards. But I have to question anything that is reported by the National Enquirer.

[arnaldoabru 11]

The baby's father is an alien and Elvis is also involved with this women

[AFTiger 282]

This is just getting started. It will be a an internet event long before the MSM begins to report it.

Sam Stein

The Huffington Post

Edwards Mystery: Innocuous Videos Suddenly Shrouded In Secrecy

In the summer of 2006, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards commissioned a series of web-based documentary shorts for his pre-announcement leadership PAC, the One America Committee. Within political circles, the videos were regarded as innovative, having successfully painted Edwards in a sympathetic, down-to-earth light.

Now, however, nearly all traces of the webisodes - as they became known - are gone. Links to them on the Internet no longer work. The Edwards campaign won't release the videos, and the production company behind the films is citing confidentiality agreements in refusing to talk.

This closed-off approach naturally aroused my interest. In the world of politics, rare is the candidate who passes on a chance for publicity. The campaign's explanation for stonewalling, moreover, struck me as dubious and at times evasive.

I had come to the Edwards' videos in a haphazard way: the byproduct of a story I was writing on new technology and politics. The webisodes were not, in any regard, a secret. Edwards' "behind the scenes" portrait had earned rave reviews in the blogosphere and even a small feature in Newsweek. But nothing had been written about the films since Edwards announced his presidential aspirations, and I wanted to know how the footage would play on the campaign trail.

What followed was a lesson in the profound irritations of political reporting. A call to Edwards' press shop led to an email to his One America Committee representative, which led, in turn, to a mind-bending exchange about campaign finance law, which culminated in a separate conversation with Edwards' deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince. Each time I was told that the One America Committee could not use "material that could be considered promoting the presidential campaign," and that Edwards' camp "no longer had access to most of the content."

Thwarted, I tried my hand with the movie's producers. A search for the filmmaker, Rielle Hunter, proved that Google does, in fact, have its limitations. No hits. The same held true with Facebook and Myspace - a bizarre level of anonymity for someone in the movie business.

The production company responsible for the webisodes, Midline Groove Productions, had a minimalist website. Through it, however, I was able to email Mimi Hockman, Rielle Hunter's partner, to ask if I could screen the tapes. She directed me to a Business Week website where the last remaining webisode link still functioned. But beyond that, I was rebuffed. Once again, the reasons seemed strangely artificial.

"Our contract expired last year," Hockman emailed, "and the Edwards camp owns all of the webisodes and footage."

(Hmmm.... The campaign had said it couldn't access the footage.) Could we at least talk off the record about the filming process?

"Nope," she wrote. "Not a chance."

My reportorial curiosity thoroughly piqued, I decided to dig further.

Who is Rielle Hunter? The Newsweek item said Edwards met the aspiring actress and filmmaker in a New York City bar. A call to the Screen Actors Guild elicited the following exchange:

Screen Actors Guild: "This performer chooses not to list her contact information in the membership database."

HuffPost: "So if I wanted to contact her about her work with web video?"

SAG: "Well, I don't know what to tell you. It's up to the performer to choose whether they are listed or not."

A check of the movie database IMDB.com listed her as a director and actor in the short Billy Bob and Them. And an Internet write up of a 2005 interview she apparently gave to Breathe Magazine described her as a "formerly hard-partying girl who claims that she found enlightenment."

How much did the videos cost? According to campaign finance reports, the One America Committee made four payments of $12,500 and two of $25,000, for a total of $100,000 to Midline Groove Productions in the second half of 2006.

Who else was involved? Credits from the webisode still on the Business Week site listed three additional production assistants. One of them, Sam Cullman, said he could not talk to me but lauded Edwards for his openness. Another assistant, Nick Chatfield, said on the first call to my editor that he wished the movies were available because he could use the publicity. On the second call (having evidently checked back with Hunter or the Edwards campaign), Chatfield said, "Don't call me again."

Most important of all: Was there, in fact, a legal reason that prohibited Edwards from showing the webisodes? One campaign finance expert told me that, "if used by the presidential campaign, the videos are considered an in-kind contribution, which is limited at $5,000 in value... Still," he added, "this is an abundance of caution." Others didn't tread as lightly. "bull****", "baloney", and "malarkey" were the words used by three eminent experts in the field to describe Edwards' stance.

Presented with this record, the Edwards campaign finally relented. But even then they proved surprisingly guarded.

Jonathan Prince offered to let me and my editor, Tom Edsall, watch the videos - apparently unaware that at one point his campaign claimed not to have access to them. But there was a proviso: we could only view the videos in Prince's presence.

We accepted the offer. But oh, how the story and my interests have changed. No longer am I working on a piece about new media and politics - boring! Now, I just want to know why these webisodes are shrouded in such mystery.

Not lost in the matter is the irony of Edwards' stance. After all, the videos were made with the apparent goal of bringing transparency to the political process. "I've come to the conclusion I just want the country to see who I really am," Edwards declared in the one webisode still public, "not based on some plastic Ken doll you put up in front of audiences."

I'm still waiting to see.

HuffPost

[autigeremt 6,719]

How about that!

I hope for his wifes sake it's false. She's been through enough, already.

[Tigermike 3,065]

Actually The NATIONAL ENQUIRER is more reputable than HUFPO.

[AFTiger 282]

Actually The NATIONAL ENQUIRER is more reputable than HUFPO.

or the New York Times