Politics

Those defense lawyers in the John Edwards trial put on a case so bare-bones — three days and they were done — that it was confident to the point of cockiness. You got nothin, it told prosecutors, so why should we belabor the
Former U.S. senator John Edwards and daughter Cate leave for lunch during jury deliberations May 24, 2012, at the federal courthouse in Greensboro, N.C. Edwards is charged with accepting excessive campaign funds to conceal his extramarital affair while he ran for president. A fifth day of jury deliberations got under way on Thursday in Edwards’s campaign finance case, which legal experts have said could expand the definition of what qualifies as campaign contributions. (JOHN ADKISSON - REUTERS) point?

But after five days of deliberations, someone in that jury room obviously thinks otherwise.

No one could envy the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to whom nothing is supposed to matter but the facts of the criminal case against the former hotshot attorney, who stands accused of illegally using almost $1 million in secret donations to keep his pregnant mistress, Rielle Hunter, out of sight during his ‘08 presidential run. His defense is that those were gifts from friends, intended to keep the relationship from his wife, Elizabeth, who was terminally ill with breast cancer and died in 2010.

Yet the jurors know as well as anybody that Edwards, who also used to be able to appear in public without being hissed at by strangers, has four kids in three cities who need him in their lives no matter what he’s done. And whatever their verdict, the jurors have already lived up to Judge Catherine Eagles’s praise for them, at the end of voir dire, as “willing to serve your nation.’’

A month later, with Memorial Day weekend upon us, they’re still at it, reviewing 20 more court exhibits on Thursday alone.

If there’s a hung jury, he’ll surely walk, because it’s hard to imagine the government would retry the case. And knowing that they only needed one holdout, maybe his lawyers were right to have skipped over some potential witnesses. For instance, they spared his grown daughter Cate the ordeal of testifying, though she could perhaps have softened the jury’s impression of her dad.

Still, the Obama-appointed judge has convinced me that if I were on that panel, I’d have to vote guilty.

Not because renewing your wedding vows while your mistress is pregnant retires the trophy for compartmentalizing, though it does.

Not because the defendant is a natural born slickster, either, though he is, or used to be.

And certainly not because a guilty verdict would in any way deter the next self-deluding king of the world who thinks boundaries are for other people.

Here’s why: The judge’s instructions to the jury said, “The government does not have to prove that the sole or only purpose of the money was to influence the election. People rarely act with a single purpose in mind. On the other hand, if the donor would have made the gift or payment notwithstanding the election, it does not become a contribution merely because the gift or payment might have some impact on the election. Nor does it become a contribution just because the donor knew it might have some influence on the election and found that acceptable, if the donor’s real purpose was personal or otherwise unrelated to the election.”

Which strikes me as pretty darn clear.

Bunny Mellon, the now 101-year-old heiress who wrote “for the rescue of America,” on a note accompanying one of the hefty checks used to keep Hunter in first-class accommodations, would never have been writing checks if Edwards, who reminded her of her friend Jack Kennedy, hadn’t been running.

Neither would Dallas trial attorney Fred Baron, who has since died of cancer, too. Former Edwards aide Andrew Young testified convincingly that when Young initially raised the idea of going to Baron for the cash, Edwards dismissed the idea. That’s because he wrote Baron off as an untrustworthy gossip, and suggested they weren’t close friends. So why did Baron later fork over the cash, and lots of it? Young said Baron believed that if Edwards were elected, or became attorney general, it would be good for his fellow trial lawyers.

Maybe Eagles ruled incorrectly on those instructions to the jury, but it would be hard to argue that she did so for political reasons.

And the more you focus on them, the harder it is to conclude that a jury would have to be intent on punishing sin, rather than simply following the law, to find John Edwards guilty.

Melinda Henneberger is a Post political writer and anchors the paper’s “She the People” blog. Follow her on Twitter at @MelindaDC.

DALLAS – For those of us who follow what the late Ann Richards once called the “contact sport’’ of politics, there is perhaps no g
Former presidential candidate and Sen. John Edwards arrives at a federal courthouse in Greensboro, N.C. Edwards is accused of conspiring to secretly obtain more than $900,000 from two wealthy supporters to hide his extramarital affair with Rielle Hunter and her pregnancy. He has pleaded not guilty to six charges related to violations of campaign-finance laws. (Chuck Burton - AP) reater provocateur than the candidate caught cheating.

Although marital infidelity is nothing new on the campaign trail, the range of offenses and the creativity of the cover-ups have diversified since the pre-Gary Hart days when affairs were routinely ignored by the political press corps.

Today, of course, we’re at the opposite end of the spectrum, with the jury literally out in the trial of former senato John Edwards in Greensboro, N.C.  His long-suffering daughter Cate, 30, has been at his side, an embodiment of her late mother, Elizabeth Edwards, who suffered severe collateral damage from her husband’s affair with Rielle Hunter.

Although John Edwards is on trial for allegedly violating campaign finance laws in the process of hiding the affair, interest is no doubt stoked by the prospect of a harsh reckoning for someone who cheated on his wife while she was battling terminal cancer.

But is John Edwards the worst offender among the fraternity of rogue political husbands? Consider the competition:

George Will argues in Thursday morning’s Washington Post that the controversy over Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s native American roots — or lack thereof -- has “discombobulated” her campaign.

Massachusetts voters apparently do not agree.

The biggest surprise in the new Suffolk University poll out Thursday is how unfazed by the flap the citizenry there appears to be.

It is not that people haven’t heard of the furor around Warren’s claim, based on family lore, that she is 1/32nd Cherokee, and the questions that have been raised about whether she reaped some professional benefit from the designation.

How could they not, given the amount of coverage the story has received since it broke last month in the Boston Herald?

Dozens of Catholic institutions have hauled off and sued the Obama administration, claiming religious freedom is on the line. But as I see it, both sides are in the wrong.

More than 40 Catholic schools, hospitals, charities and dioceses, including the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. are going to court, ostensibly to fight a requirement that would force them to violate church teaching by including free contraceptive coverage for employees in their health plans by as soon as Aug. 1.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York (Andrew Medichin - AP)

The litigants do have one point: It’s true that the Department of Health and Human Services has so narrowly defined its exemption for religious institutions that it really only covers churches, dioceses, and diocesan schools, but not other church-run hospitals and charities.

That’s a mistake. And that the HHS hasn’t addressed the problem is seen by those who are suing as proof that they aren’t being heard, or dealt with in good faith, so to speak.

LONDON — Britain’s phone hacking scandal truly is the gift that keeps on giving. On Sunday, news broke from the Cannes Film Festival that “Rebekah Brooks: The Movie” will be coming soon to a theater near you.

Most people know Rebekah Brooks as Rupert Murdoch’s erstwhile girl Friday in the British arm of his media empire, News Corp. Until July of last year, she served as chief executive at the London-based News International, before abruptly resigning over her alleged role in the phone-hacking scandal.