Two Lucky Dogs

September 14, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, News media 

When he was campaigning for President, former North Carolina senator and 2004 Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards’ ancestral background was looked into, as is often the case with candidates, and it turned out he was of predominantly Scots-Irish ancestry. Given his career in the last six weeks, it would appear that the emphasis is on the Irish part, because his luck, even after the revelation of his affair with campaign “videographer” Rielle Hunter and his (seemingly temporary) withdrawal from public life, has still held.

After Edwards’ somewhat selective confession on ABC’s Nightline on August 8, for two weeks some parts of the mainstream media and several bloggers (including, of course, yours truly) examined the various oddities and lacunae of the case. It became apparent after a while that the term “Riellegate” (which seems to have been first used by the blogger Twocanpete on August 15, and which I coined independently a few days later) might fit the situation, since the developments of greatest concern to what my colleague Frank called “questions of law and justice” did not involve Edwards’ relationship with Hunter, but the network of curious comings and goings (as far afield as the West Indies) and the financial arrangements that seemed to flow from it.

Then came the Democratic convention, and Sen. John McCain’s selection of Gov. Sarah Palin for vice-president, and in the tumult of those events the Edwards affair was almost forgotten except as a point of comparison when discussing press coverage of Gov. Palin’s personal life. For a while it appeared as if it would return to prominence, when Edwards kept some September and October speaking dates at colleges on his schedule, but then he magnanimously canceled these so as not to interfere with Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Joe Biden’s prospects for the White House.

But even the deftest of politicians often make one mistake that sets the whole house of cards tumbling. And it looks like Edwards made such a misstep last fall.

In October 2007, after the National Enquirer broke the story that Edwards was involved with a then-unnamed woman, the Raleigh News & Observer began to look into the matter. The Edwards campaign got word of this and some of its minions began phoning the newspaper – off the record – to deny the story.

Then Edwards himself phoned News & Observer executive editor John Drescher. Speaking off the record, the ex-senator strenuously denied the Enquirer’s report, and pleaded with Drescher not to print anything about it, pointing out that the N&O was read by many of his neighbors and that to have it appear there would cause particular distress to his wife Elizabeth, who, Drescher hardly needed to be reminded, was battling cancer.

So the N&O published nothing at the time, and, when Edwards made his confession of sorts almost a year later, Drescher let the paper’s readers know that he had been lied to.

As readers of recent TNN posts about W. Mark Felt know, journalists will go to extraordinary lengths to protect an off-the-record source that gives them accurate or at least illuminating information.

But if it turns out the source has lied to protect himself or herself from exposure, the gloves come off. And today, the News & Observer is letting Edwards learn what that’s all about, as shown in an article about his onetime aide Andrew Young, who figures so prominently and curiously in Riellegate.

Last week, the National Enquirer, though otherwise back to its usual mix of celebrity dirt and anonymously sourced allegations and rumors (some of them about Gov. Palin, albeit perhaps a bit too tepid for Andrew Sullivan’s blog or the front page of the New York Times), did publish a one-page article about Young, who, through an attorney (who no longer represents him), issued a statement last December proclaiming himself to be the father of Rielle Hunter’s daughter Frances Quinn. The article stated that Young, despite this claim, had made no visible effort to contribute to the upkeep of his putative child since her birth, and, indeed, had shown no particular interest in spending time with her. (After Hunter fled media scrutiny in Santa Barbara and flew to St. Croix last month, Young, with his wife and three legitimate children, quietly left Santa Barbara, where they had been living in the same gated subdivision as Hunter, and resettled in North Carolina, while Hunter remained in California.) The sources quoted by the Enquirer were unnamed “friends,” as usual with the paper, but it should be kept in mind that what it has published about the Edwards case before has subsequently been verified by other media.

Last month the New York Post contacted Young’s mother, who expressed her strong wish that Edwards and Hunter take a DNA test to determine Frances Quinn’s paternity. She said nothing about her son taking a similar test and, according to the paper, made it clear that she doubted he had fathered the child.

Today’s News & Observer article (entitled, somewhat sarcastically, “Scandal Tough On Edwards Aide”) discusses Young’s occasional brushes with the law for alcohol and traffic-related offenses in the last two decades – indeed, the piece is illustrated with what appears to be his mug shot from one of these occasions. It also examines his various jobs since graduating from Wake Forest University’s law school in the 1990s, the salaries these jobs paid, and his consistent habit of acquiring houses and property seemingly a bit beyond his financial means. It also tells of his abrupt ability, after the fall of 2007, to afford these properties and do things like pay off a $270,000 mortgage in one fell swoop, despite having no visibie means of support in that time beyond comparatively modest monthly payments extended to him by trial lawyer Fred Baron, the generous former finance chairman of the Edwards campaign, in order to protect him and his family from the prying eyes of reporters.

I trust Lorenzo Perez and Ames Alexander, the authors of the N&O article, are already looking into the following questions:

1. It has been stated that Fred Baron, though he had been acquainted with John Edwards since the 1980s, did not begin spending significant time with him until 1999. When did Baron make the acquaintance of Andrew Young? Was it in 1997 when Young became lobbyist for the North Carolina trial lawyers’ association, before he went to work for Edwards?

2. Did the fact that Frances Quinn Hunter was born in California, her mother having moved from North Carolina when she was in utero, have anything to do with the fact that it is a felony in North Carolina for a birth certificate issued by that state to be used for any purpose of deception – a statute so broadly worded that deliberate omission of the name of a child’s father on the certificate, or deliberate use of a name of a person known not to be the actual father, could be considered to constitute such a deception? (Here, I should point out that California law specifies that the father’s name on the birth certificate, where the mother is unmarried, is to be left blank, as happened in this case, unless the person identified as the father affirms – and not just in a statement made to a newspaper through a lawyer months before the child’s birth – that he is willing to accept legal responsibility for parenthood.)

3. In a previous TNN post I pointed out that last month, a day before Rielle Hunter traveled from Santa Barbara to St. Croix, and again a few days before her return to California, a jet “controlled” by Fred Baron went from Love Field in Dallas to Providenciales International Airport in the Turks and Caicos Islands, remained there for a few minutes over one hour, then returned to Dallas. Can it be established that Andrew Young was in Santa Barbara (where he was supposed to be living for “work-related purposes,” as the N&O article notes) on those two days, and if not, where was he?

Ah – before I forget, time to explain the title of my post. This links to a listing of Andrew Young’s brushes with the law. It concludes with the address he had when he moved to Chapel Hill from Raleigh last year, and with what seems to be the name of the business he headed when he lived at that address. It is “Lucky Dog 15, LLC.”

LLC, of course, stands for limited liability company. As any law-school graduate (like Young) knows, an LLC can be set up with just one member, and be run by just one manager who can also be the one member. It’s a good arrangement for tax purposes when acquiring income. But it does require documents to be filed in the state in which the LLC is based. Would that, in the case of Lucky Dog 15, be North Carolina? Or somewhere else?

I hate to disillusion my colleague David Emig, but enquiring minds want to know. More particularly – and more ominously for John Edwards, Andrew Young, and some other people – enquiring North Carolina journalists want to know.

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