John Edwards 'did not break the law,' attorney says

 
As the government neared a decision on whether to indict former Sen. John Edwards on criminal campaign finance violations in connection with a sex scandal, his attorney furiously denied Wednesday that he had broken the law, or even that any law applied to the situation.
"John Edwards has done wrong in his life — and he knows it better than anyone — but he did not break the law," said his attorney, former White House Counsel Gregory Craig. "The government's theory is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. It is novel and untested. There is no civil or criminal precedent for such a prosecution."
A federal grand jury in North Carolina has spent two years looking into charges that Edwards violated campaign finance law by using money from two supporters to keep his pregnant mistress and a former aide out of sight while he sought the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Campaign contributions may not be used for personal expenses.

The Justice Department declined to comment.
Edwards, who was John F. Kerry's vice presidential running mate in 2004, admitted fathering a child with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter shortly after his wife's breast cancer had recurred. Elizabeth Edwards died in December.
If Edwards, 57, could reach a deal with prosecutors, he would probably have to surrender his license to practice law to avoid a potentially humiliating trial. But Craig's strident tone sounded as if Edwards was not considering a deal.
"The Justice Department has wasted millions of dollars and thousands of hours on a matter more appropriately a topic for the Federal Election Commission to consider, not a criminal court," Craig said.
Resolution of the investigation would be a long-awaited coda to a sordid and protracted political scandal.
Edwards, a wealthy personal injury attorney whose populist message about "two Americas" resonated with Democrats, refused for years to level with his family and the public about the true nature of his relationship with Hunter.
The National Enquirer first revealed it in 2007, weeks after he and Elizabeth had renewed their wedding vows. The story, Edwards said on the campaign trail, was "completely untrue, ridiculous. Anyone who knows me knows that I have been in love with the same woman 30-plus years."
In a 2008 television interview when he was no longer running for president, Edwards apologized for straying with Hunter but denied fathering her child.
It wasn't until January 2010 that Edwards admitted he was the father of Frances Quinn Hunter, now 3. His confession came days before publication of "The Politician," a tell-all book by former Edwards aide Andrew Young, who played a pivotal role in the deceit.
In an effort to protect his political career from the fallout of a sex scandal, Edwards had engineered a number of bizarre turns. In late 2007, he allowed Young, a married father of three, to falsely admit fathering Hunter's baby. Young and his family went into seclusion with Hunter, staying in luxury homes and hotels around the country to avoid the media.
It was the payment mechanism for this ruse that led to the government's investigation.
The money came from two Edwards supporters — his national campaign finance chairman, Fred Baron, who died in 2008, and banking heiress Rachel "Bunny" Mellon, who is 100.
In an interview last year, Young said Baron provided hundreds of thousands of dollars and loaned his Aspen, Colo., estate to the Youngs and Hunter. Mellon provided about $700,000. Young said he and Edwards called her contributions "Bunny money."
According to Mellon's attorney, she gave the money to Edwards as a personal gift and filed a gift tax return.
"She intended it for his personal use and had no understanding of what his need was and where the money would go," her attorney, Alexander Forger, told the Associated Press in January 2010.
But prosecutors likely think the money constituted campaign contributions because it was used to preserve Edwards' political viability.
"The government originally investigated allegations that Sen. Edwards' campaign funds were misused, but continued its pursuit even after finding that not one penny from the Edwards campaign was involved," Craig said Wednesday.
Hunter kept such a low profile that Time magazine headlined a February 2010 profile "The Quiet Dignity of Rielle Hunter." A month later, however, she introduced herself to the public in spectacular fashion, giving GQ magazine an interview and posing for photographs in a shirt with no pants.
A few months earlier, in January 2010, she had sued Young and his wife, Cheri, for invasion of privacy, demanding the return of a videotape she said they had stolen. The Youngs claimed that the tape, purportedly showing Hunter and Edwards having sex, had been abandoned by Hunter when she moved out of their home. That civil suit is pending in North Carolina.
Edwards is raising his and Elizabeth's two youngest children, who are still school age. An older daughter, Cate, is an attorney. Their son Wade died in 1996 at 16. Both Edwardses often cited Wade's death as the reason John Edwards entered politics.
"The Politician" is being made into a movie, directed by Aaron Sorkin.

orge Posada Apologizes To Yankees, Says ‘I Had A Bad Day’

NEW YORK (WFAN/AP) — Jorge Posada still has unwavering support in the Yankee Stadium stands. Now, a tumultuous weekend behind him, New York could use a few of those big hits he used to deliver all the time.
Posada apologized to the Yankees on Sunday for taking himself out of the lineup the day before, blaming the messy public spat with the team on this: “I had a bad day.”
“All the frustration came out,” said the slumping star, who met with manager Joe Girardi and general manager Brian Cashman and told them he was sorry. “It was just one of those days you wish you could take back.”
Posada was not in the starting lineup against Boston left-hander Jon Lester, but that was about strategy, not punishment. That said, the Yankees did contact the commissioner’s office during Saturday night’s blowup about possible recourse — a pursuit they’ve since dropped.
When the Red Sox went to their bullpen, Posada came off the bench. He entered as a pinch-hitter in the eighth inning late Sunday night, triggering a boisterous standing ovation, but couldn’t prevent the Yankees from losing their season-high fifth straight.

Chris Bosh regains his shooting touch at United Center

Chris Bosh returned to the scene of his slime Sunday night and redeemed himself by scoring a game-high 30 points on 12-for-18 shooting.

That’s a far cry from his 1-for-18 shooting the last time he and his ­Miami Heat mates played in the United Center.

“But it wasn’t enough,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said after the Bulls beat the Heat 103-82 before a sellout crowd of 22,874 to take a 1-0 lead in their best-of-seven-game Eastern Conference final.

“He’s important to what we do. Everybody knows that. And they were loading up their defense so much [against Dwyane Wade and LeBron James] off the dribble that he was able to be a recipient in the paint. But we need more offensively. But before we even talk about that, we need to finish our defense with all the effort and big-muscle areas and we did not do that tonight.”

Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau said he definitely was not expecting a repeat of Bosh’s nightmare.

“Bosh has been a very good player, a great player, in this league for a long time,” Thibodeau said. “Every great player will have a game like that once in a blue moon. So we knew the likelihood of that happening again was remote.

“But we’ve got to do a better job on him. And they put a lot of pressure on you. They execute and they spread you out. They’ve got guys that can go off the dribble and you have to have a multiple effort ­mentally. [Bosh] is a hard guy [to guard]. He’s got a quick release. He plays off his jam extremely well. He can hurt you inside on the rolls. He can face you up. So he can score in a lot of different ways.”

And the 6-11 center-forward did just that Sunday. He added nine rebounds to his night’s work. In fact, he was the Heat’s star in this game. And he played so well that he relegated Wade and James to reserve roles in the postgame interviews. He was the only Heat player brought out to the interview podium. Wade, who scored 18 points, and James, who scored 15, held court in the locker room.

But with all due respect. I don’t believe Bosh when he said that he paid little attention and had limited memory about that night when his shooting touch went totally awry.

“You have tough games and you have great games,” said Bosh, who also went 6-for-6 from the line on Sunday. “But that game never even entered my thought process, You make mistakes, you learn from them and you go on. What we have to do is look at where we fell short as a team and come back and do a better job [in Game 2 on Wednesday night].

“We shot out own selves in the foot. We did not move our bodies and we did not move the ball like we should. We certainly will have to do a better job of defending and rebounding. We’ll dissect this game, look at what we did wrong and make the necessary corrections.”

Bosh scored 17 of his points in the first half. But the Heat did not flash the balance it has had in the past when Wade and James usually dominate the stats.

D'Alessandro: Chicago Bulls flex their muscle in Game 1

CHICAGO — By now, you probably have prepared yourself for the strong possibility that this playoff series will not always be an artistic triumph, despite Eric Spoelstra’s prediction (or was it his delusion?) that “at some point a basketball game will break out.”
Four quarters in, and we’re still waiting for that to happen for his Miami team. No doubt, there were long and competitive stretches Sunday night in which the Heat looked comfortable with the grunt game that the Chicago Bulls play so well. But that was a mirage.
Whether they are equipped to play this kind of game remains to be seen, but they had better learn quickly that this series will be decided by the coach who can get his team to lock in longer defensively. In this particular instance, that team was Chicago, and for 48 minutes it was a masterpiece of the art.
That was the lesson from Game 1, a 103-82 Chicago blowout, and it was a sight to behold. The Bulls were more precise, more intense, more dedicated to making certain that every last stop was brought to its conclusion, with their four main bigs snatching more rebounds than the entire Miami team.
It didn’t hurt, either, that Derrick Rose played like the MVP and that honorary Jersey guy Luol Deng — a Blair Academy product — outplayed LeBron James by a substantial margin.
Or that every last guy off Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau’s bench was a game-changer.
Or that there was a 45-33 blowout on the glass, and a 31-8 landslide in second-chance points.
Etc., etc.
Some coaches would call it beautiful, and that’s their right. But when you lose, you think otherwise, and even Chris Bosh had to admit, “We took a beating tonight.”
So while it doesn’t change our opinion that the Heaters are the better group here, let’s just say that the Bulls now have their full attention.
This is worth noting because after it was over, one of the first things out of Thibodeau’s mouth was, “There are things we have to clean up defensively.” Nothing is left to chance with this guy, and every mistake elicits coaching castigation.
Think of it this way: Chicago scored its first three times out of the gate in the second half, and even though Bosh had just blown by Joakim Noah for a lefty score, the Bulls had their largest lead (55-50) of the game.
But Dwyane Wade then found a seam for a score, and James set up a Bosh jam off a side screen/roll that was too quick for the help (Boozer) to stop this from happening.
They hadn’t even played three minutes in the second half, but what did Thibodeau do? He called timeout, probably to reinforce the no-layup rule, as the Bulls had now yielded three straight layups.
“We were spread out,” he explained later. “As ball goes away, we have to handle the weak side better. And our ball pressure wasn’t where we wanted it to be.”
What happened from there was extraordinary. The Heat took their final lead at 58-57 on James’ 20-foot turnaround fadeaway with Deng in his mug, but that’s where Thibodeau’s defense shut Miami’s water off.
The 3-pointers by Rose and Keith Bogans started the train rolling, but the real work was at the other end: Miami shot 2-for-9 the rest of the period with three turnovers, as blocks in the paint by Noah and Taj Gibson (on Wade and James, respectively), brought the house down.
And then, just to prove it was no fluke, Chicago’s second unit held Miami to 1-for-4 with a turnover to start the fourth quarter, with a 3-point fling from C.J. Watson making it an 83-66 runaway.
“They simply overwhelmed us,” Spoelstra said. “They’re an excellent defensive team. Losing a lot of those effort areas really deflated us, and we lost concentration on the offensive end, and it got away from us.”
There’s no denying it: There is enough star-based electricity in this series to generate enough power for a medium-sized city.
And this is not likely to devolve into a retrograde smackdown that only Vince McMahon would feel comfortable promoting.
But the Panhandle Series out West will be the more interesting one from an offensive standpoint. Among those remaining in the Final Four, Dallas is executing best, and if Kevin Durant has one of those can’t-touch-this weeks from the outer limits, those are games that are going to be played into the one-teens.
The Eastern encounter is not going there, judging by the first 48 minutes — and by Miami’s ability to learn on the fly.
“In the playoffs, there aren’t good performances and bad performances,” Spoelstra said. “There are wins and losses.”
But Chicago has established the style it will win with. It’s remarkably effective, and historically proven. Pat Riley, long before he put this Heat team together, called them “big muscle activities.” Thibodeau’s team might be the paradigm.