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By Peter J. Henning

The criminal investigation of former Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards for secretly funneling money to his ex-lover Rielle Hunter is moving toward a conclusion, and there is a good chance he will be indicted if federal prosecutors can link the payments to his campaign committee or find that contributors were deceived about the purpose of the donations.

Voicemails released by North Carolina television station WTVD show Edwards’ connection to keeping his affair with Ms. Hunter secret.  An NBC New report in February disclosed that federal prosecutors were planning to take the deposition of one of the sources of nearly $1 million used to keep Ms. Hunter out of sight while she was pregnant with their child.

The investigation into payments made to Ms. Hunter while Mr. Edwards was running for the 2008 Democratic nomination for President has been going on for almost two years.  According to campaign records, she was purportedly paid for producing campaign videos.  A former top aide to Mr. Edwards, Andrew Young, originally claimed to be the father of the child, but has now turned on his former boss and described in detail how large sums were provided to support Ms. Hunter, who is not a target of the investigation.

Sex scandals involving politicians normally just end the person’s political career, at least in this country.  And paying off a secret lover to buy silence is not normally a crime, at least when the politician uses his own money.   According to Mr. Young, however, the money came from wealthy donors, including $700,000 from Rachel “Bunny” Melloon, an aged wealthy patron of Mr. Edwards, who gave personal checks hidden in candy boxes.

The funds provided for Ms. Hunter pose a problem for Mr. Edwards if the money was collected for his presidential campaign committee and instead was tapped to make payments on her behalf, or even given directly to her.  Politicians once viewed their campaign accounts as something akin to a personal piggy bank, and the money can still be used for a number of things that have little to do with actually running for office, like paying for an attorney to defend against an ethics investigation or even a criminal investigation.

Mr. Edwards would not be the target of a grand jury investigation were it not for a provision added to the federal campaign finance laws in 2002 as part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.  That law, codified at 2 U.S.C. § 439a, states that a campaign contribution or donation “shall not be converted by any person to personal use.”  The statute contains a list of uses that would be considered “personal,” such as buying clothes or paying for a vacation.  While it does not specifically list payments to an ex-lover to keep the person quiet while running for President, that would certainly seem to come within the term “personal use.”

The issue for prosecutors is whether the money passed through Mr. Edwards’ campaign committee, or whether it was simply presented to donors as a way to “support” the candidate but never intended to be a campaign contribution.  Federal law imposes strict reporting requirements on campaign contributions, and limits donations to an individual candidate to $2,500. The amount of money collected on behalf of Ms. Hunter clearly exceeded statutory limitations, which may show that the payments were never meant to be related directly to Mr. Edwards’ short-lived campaign for the presidency.  Apart from the campaign finance issue is the question of whether financial support provided to Ms. Hunter was properly reported a

Tribute to the 3D retro game Hunter for the Commodore Amiga computer, released in 1991.

You're invited to Sevensheaven.nl for an extended impression.

“I’m telling you, man. Miss Shannon gets all the best stuff.”

“I don’t get a big giant hammer to thump monsters with.”

“No, you just get a big giant cat with fangs and claws!”

“Rawr.”

“Check out the new updated Warrior of the Night Page folks.”

“That’s my best friend Shannon-sama! She’s a magical warrior just like us! She has the powers of the night and starlight and Kishi is her pet that helps her fight because he’s a magical cat.”

“I put this illustration of the Warrior of the Night up in my Sketchbook and Illustration Gallery too.”

“We’ve got a webnovel preview any second folks. Don’t miss out!”

“See you soon!”

Author Kevin J. Hayes has been very busy writing American Literature: A Very Short Introduction, but he needs your help. Find out what you can do below.

Last week I boasted to friends that I had written my first blog. Longtime bloggers may find my sense of accomplishment overblown, but last week’s blog did mark my entry to this innovative world of communication. Being new to the blogosphere, I was unsure what kind of responses I would receive. As things turned out, the comments were quite useful. They point to a major problem facing American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. This little book about a big topic requires me to make some tough choices. Who should I include? Who can I exclude? Where should I discuss each author?

Responding to my query about American travel writers, James suggested I include Hunter S. Thompson. Though a great Thompson fan, I am excluding him from the travels chapter. Instead, I’ll put him with novels. The sixties took the postmodern novel to a dead end, but it gave rise to an exciting literary movement: New Journalism. For a time, journalists exceeded novelists in terms of literary virtuosity. As a digression in my novels chapter, I will discuss the work of such writers as Truman Capote, Peter Maas, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson.

Ideally, I would like to discuss every author only once. But what should I do about authors who wrote in different genres? Pick their most important genre and ignore the others? Only major figures who excelled in multiple genres can justify separate discussions. Take Henry James for instance. Best known as a novelist, James was also a fine travel writer and memoirist. I can justify discussing James in two or three different places, but I do not have room to discuss every genre of every author.

So, here are my questions. Which American authors excelled in more than one literary genre? Where should I discuss them? Are they important enough to deserve discussion in more than one chapter? Boy, that’s a loaded question. Here’s a more fundamental one: what constitutes literary importance?

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Cabal's cape did nothing to protect him against his encounter with a skunk last night... while I didn't have much of a right hand last night, for reasons you will learn at http://www.birdchick.com/2007/10/mr-neil-takes-one-for-team_22.html, so we didn't deskunk him until this morning.

There's an interview with me in The Independent in which I mention a few things I don't think I've said on the record before...


Neil --
In Ross Douthat's recent column in the Atlantic Monthly concerning the J.K. Rowling press of late (http://tinyurl.com/yq2wz2), Douthat suggests that "a writer confident in her powers wouldn't feel the need to announce details like this". It seems odd to me that ulterior motives are so quickly suspected -- she was an author answering a question with additional information not previously known. Do you find yourself withholding information during Q&A if it's not already contained in the story? Why or why not?

All that tells us is that Ross Douthat doesn't write fiction.

You always wind up knowing more about your characters than you can get onto the page. Pages are finite, and the story isn't about giving you all the information about everyone in it any more than life is. Things the author knows about characters (or at least, strongly suspects -- it's never really real until it hits the page, because the process of writing is also a process of discovery) that don't make it onto the page could include the characters' backstory, what they like to eat, the toothpaste they use, what happens to them after the story is over or before it began, and what they do in bed. That something didn't turn up in the books just means it didn't make it onto the page or wasn't relevant to the story. (Or even, it made it in and the author cut that scene out because it didn't work. One of my favourite scenes in Anansi Boys went because it made the chapter work better when it was gone.)

(I remember being astonished when I learned a few years ago, from an obituary, that two teachers I'd had as a child were a same-sex couple. Mostly astonished because at the age where they taught me, I didn't imagine that teachers had romantic lives, or were even entirely human; and learning that they were a pair reconfigured everything I knew about them, which wasn't very much.)

Neverwhere has two gay characters who are Out, as far as the book is concerned, and one major character who is gay but it isn't mentioned, simply because that character was one of many people in that book who don't have any sexual or romantic entanglements during the story. So it's irrelevant.

Sometimes even the author doesn't know for sure. (I used to wonder about Lucien the Librarian in Sandman. On the one hand, I strongly suspected he was gay; on the other, he seemed to have a small unrequited thing for Nuala going on. And if it had ever mattered in a story, I would have found out for certain, but it never did, so I didn't.)

And, truth to tell, sexuality tends to be such a minor thing, if you have several hundred characters running around in your head. You know more than you've written. One of the characters in Wall in Stardust, for example, is not what he is pretending to be in a way that has nothing at all to do with sex, although the clues are all there in the book, but if I don't do another story set in Wall you'll never find out who he is, or even why he's interesting.

As for withholding information... before the Internet, I'd tell anyone anything they wanted to know. ("Who's the missing member of the Endless?" "Destruction." "Oh.") After the Internet, I would try and avoid answering some direct questions because it might spoil things for people. "Why did Delight become Delirium?" "Who's the Forgotten God?" -- they're questions I would happily have answered for anyone who asked at a signing 20 years ago, because it wouldn't have gone any further, not in any way that mattered. Not any longer, because one day I may tell those stories. (If I knew for sure I wouldn't tell them, then I'd happily answer people now.)

Neil, would you please post the best-ever rice pudding recipe you mentioned? Presuming you were able to recreate it, of course. ^_^

Many thanks!

I tried one using the same method but I accidentally used horrible non-fat half and half instead of full cream milk, and the result was sort of grey and had a sickly corn-syrupy sort of background taste. Everything else worked though. I'll try one more, paying attention to quantities, and if it works I'll post it here.