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Edwards’ PAC paid mistress $14K, aide says

WASHINGTON (AP) — John Edwards’ political action committee paid his mistress $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 told The Associated Press on Thursday.

John Edwards admitted to having an affair with Rielle Hunter, who produced Web videos for his campaign.

The woman, Rielle Hunter, already had been paid $100,000 for the programs.

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.

Edwards last week acknowledged he had an affair with Hunter in 2006. The former Democratic presidential contender and senator from North Carolina has Sildenafil 20mg denied any knowledge of those payments to Hunter from Fred Baron, Edwards’ national finance chairman and a wealthy Dallas, Texas-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.

An associate of Edwards, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the $14,000 was paid to Hunter only after she relinquished about 100 hours of cutting-room floor videotape excerpts that were not part of four short Web videos she had produced for Midline Groove Ltd. in 2006.

Legal experts said it was important for Edwards to demonstrate the political action committee wasn’t paying Hunter merely to keep quiet about the affair.

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"One thing that’s possible is that she was still owed money from what she’d done before for the political action committee, but obviously there are less charitable explanations," said Richard Hasen, a professor specializing in campaign finance law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, California.

Edwards insisted during an interview August 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, Louisiana, which Elizabeth did not attend.

Edwards said several times in his interview with ABC News the affair was short-lived.

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Watch how Edwards, Hunter came to know each other »

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.

One of Hunter’s friends, Pigeon O’Brien, told the AP that Hunte

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