The wife of an ex-aide to John Edwards broke down on the witness stand Monday as she recounted how the candidate asked the couple to hide an affair he was having and justified using wealthy donors’ money to do it.
Testifying at Edwards’ campaign corruption trial, Cheri Young said she huddled around a phone in her Chapel Hill home with her husband, Andrew Young, and Edwards’ pregnant mistress, Rielle Hunter.
On the call, Edwards emphasized the need to preserve his campaign and keep the affair from his wife, Elizabeth, Cheri Young said. It was a couple weeks before the 2008 Iowa caucuses, and two suspicious tabloid reporters had already tracked Hunter from a doctor’s appointment to the Youngs’ home.
Edwards made the plan sound “as if it was for the good of the country,” Cheri Young said.
Asked by a prosecutor why she went along with it, Young put her hands together, pressed them to her chin and bowed her head as if in prayer. As she began to weep, U.S. District Court Judge Catherine C. Eagles dismissed the jury to give her time to compose herself.
About 25 feet away, Edwards sat back in his chair and put two fingers to his pursed lips. As Young dabbed her tears with a tissue, the former U.S. Senator glanced at his watch.
Once the jury returned, Young answered the question.
“I felt like everything had been dumped in my lap,” she said. “Everybody was on board but me. … I didn’t want the campaign to explode and for it to be my fault. I decided to live with a lie.”
During the call, Edwards suggested that it would only be a one-day story if Andrew Young took responsibility for the baby.
“‘Nobody cares about two staffers having an affair,'” Young recalled Edwards saying.
Hunter had earlier been paid as a videographer by one of the organizations linked with Edwards, who is accused of deliberately using money from two wealthy donors to hide Hunter as he sought the White House in 2008.
Edwards has pleaded not guilty to six counts related to campaign-finance violations. He faces up to 30 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines if convicted on all counts.
At issue are payments from a wealthy Texas lawyer, Fred Baron, who served as Edwards’ campaign- finance chairman and an elderly heiress, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon. Andrew Young, who testified last week under an immunity agreement, has acknowledged that he used for himself about $1 million of $1.2 million in payments from the two donors.
Earlier in her testimony, Cheri Young said she had doubts about taking the “Bunny money” and using it to cover up the affair. She said Edwards hatched the plan to have her deposit the money into an account controlled by her and her husband. Concerned about violating the federal $2,300 limit on individual campaign contributions, Young said she reluctantly agreed after insisting on hearing Edwards himself say the scheme was legal.
“I heard Mr. John Edwards tell me on the phone that he checked with the campaign lawyers and that this was legal,” she said.
Cheri Young took the witness stand late Friday after a full week of testimony by her husband, a former fundraiser and close aide to Edwards.
Though Andrew Young testified last week that the couple ended up keeping about $1 million of the money provided by two wealthy donors, the couple also paid to support the pregnant mistress out of their account, paying for her medical care, a BMW, a $2,700-a-month rental house and a monthly allowance of thousands of dollars in cash.
Cheri Young said she agreed to handle the money because if the public found out about Edwards’ affair with Hunter, the campaign and her husband’s job were in danger.
“I cannot tell you how disgusted I was. Why me? This was my husband’s fight,” she said. “Now I had to fix it.”
