...but kiss you?
Posted on 07/07/2004 4:49:46 PM PDT by Key West Girl
Look for the dirty laundry in Edwards’s closet
July 7, 2004 | Dick Morris | The Political Life
The cheering that surrounds John Kerry’s choice of John Edwards for vice president may fade quickly if the Bush campaign’s negative researchers are on the ball.
Edwards has a real vulnerability in the way he raised campaign money during his abortive presidential bid.
The North Carolina senator and former trial lawyer leaned heavily on his former peers for campaign funding. More than half of his donations came from trial lawyers, and 22 of his top 25 contributions came from his former colleagues at the bar.
While trial lawyers will not win any popularity contests, their support of Edwards, per se, will not do him much harm.
Trial lawyers are no less popular than the oil-company types who fund so much of the Bush campaign. But there is a strong indication that many of these funds may have been contributed illegally.
Trial lawyers are usually quite wealthy men whose firms are often not much more than a collection of secretaries, paralegals and processing personnel.
They sit atop these litigation factories where clerks process cases, computers encode them and low-level attorneys try to settle them out of court. Accustomed to giving large sums to political campaigns, these trial lawyers do not blink at writing six-figure checks for their favorite candidates.
But they are not used to hard-money requirements. Their usual soft-money donations to party committees and the like are easy for them to handle, but donations to a presidential campaign have to be limited to $2,000 per person. And there lies the weakness of the trial bar — finding enough people in their orbits rich enough to give $2,000 to a candidate.
For corporate attorneys, it is not hard to pass the hat around the firm and round up a sizeable sum. But in trial lawyers’ shops, the average clerk cannot usually ante up the funds to donate to a political campaign.
There is evidence that Edwards may have circumvented the campaign-finance law by bundling contributions from law clerks and paralegals who did not actually make the donations from their own funds.
Tab Turner, for example, the eminent Little Rock trial lawyer, donated $200,000 to Edwards’s campaign and his 527 committees. Investigators interviewed the clerks in his firm in whose names many of the donations were made. Slate magazine reported, on Aug. 29, 2003, that “one clerk who gave $2,000 to Edwards said that Turner had ‘asked for people to support Edwards’ and assured them that ‘he would reimburse us.’”
Edwards had to return $10,000 to several Turner employees and attorney Tab claimed that he did not know it was illegal to reimburse his employees for their donations.
One or two illegal contributions will not bring Edwards down, but it is easy to speculate that his donor list may be rife with such tales. The pressure on trial lawyers to come up with funds for the struggling Edwards campaign was intense, and many trial lawyers may have fallen victim to the temptation to use straw donors to make their contributions.
Bush’s negative-research people need to comb through the donor lists and interview each of the contributors to find out how many were putting up their bosses money.
Edwards could blow up in Kerry’s face, just as Geraldine Ferraro did in Walter Mondale’s and Thomas Eagleton did in McGovern’s. People look to the vice-presidential selection as an indicator of what kind of appointments a presidential candidate would make should he win the election. Edwards sends all the right signals — a Southerner, a moderate, a charismatic and caring senator. But should he be tripped up over campaign donations, he could become a big liability very, very quickly.
The Edwards designation opens the door for the Bush negative researchers — and they are really good at exploiting such opportunities. Really good.
Dick Morris is the author of Rewriting History, a rebuttal of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) memoir, Living History.
Perhaps Edwards was treated for Depression after the death of his son. He might have been (might still be) part of the Prozac nation.
Which reminds me. Where's the media interest in Kerry's PTSD? Teresa outlined all the symptoms but the media didn't bite. What a surprise.
You wash your mouth out with a Democrat right now!
Have either of you ever heard anything about the article posted on Drudge that Edwards website had a derrogatory page about Kerry posted the same morning he announced his choice??
LOL, "Who let the dorks out?"?? That's a good one Lady Jag!
But they have great hair.
Look for the dirty laundry in Edwards’s closet
Tab Turner is a product liability attorney who specializes in SUV rollover cases. At the time he spoke to FRONTLINE, he estimated that he was involved in 170 lawsuits against both Ford and Firestone. Turner believes that the design of the Ford Explorer is inherently defective, and that Ford and Firestone have consciously disregarded the safety of consumers. This transcript is drawn from two separate interviews, conducted in April and May 2001.
Litigation Percentage:
100% of Practice Devoted to Litigation
Attorneys:
Martens, Wendell P. "Chip"
Turner, C. Tab, Managing Partner/Owner
Practice Categories:
Products Liability Law, Motor Vehicle Defects, Personal Injury -- Defense, Personal Injury -- Plaintiff, Medical Malpractice, Business & Commercial Law
That's 8.
In March 2003, employees of Turner & Associates, a law firm in Little Rock, Ark., gave Edwards campaign contributions that appear to have been illegal. One Turner clerk who gave Edwards $2,000 told the Washington Post that the firm's principal, Tab Turner, "asked for people to support Edwards" and assured them that "he would reimburse us." Another clerk affirmed that she had given Edwards $2,000 on the understanding that Turner would reimburse her. Such reimbursements are illegal because they circumvent the $2,000 limit. The U.S. Justice Department reportedly opened an investigation, and in May 2003, the American Conservative Union asked the Federal Elections Commission to examine Edwards for "a pattern of clear violation" of campaign-finance laws. The ACU's chairman said of Edwards, "It's clear that he and his campaign organized this thing in order to allow trial lawyers and their firms to contribute illegal money." As of August 2003, neither the FEC nor the Justice Department had released any conclusions.
The Edwards campaign returned the $10,000 it had received from Turner employees but declined to review the legality of donations from employees at other law firms, arguing that "we don't have any reason to presume irregularities elsewhere."
John Edwards
Top Donors (Total Contributions through Nov. 25, 2002):
Over $100,000 -- $900,000-Steven Bing, Producer (Los Angeles, CA). $200,000-Ronald L. Motley, Attorney (Charleston, SC). $189,000-Tab Turner, Attorney (North Little Rock, AR). $125,000-John E. Williams, Jr., Attorney (Houston, TX). [$1,414,000]
$100,000 -- Frederick M. Baron, Attorney (Dallas, TX); Wade E. Byrd, Attorney (Fayetteville, NC); Foster & Sear (Arlington, TX); Girardi and Keese (Los Angeles, CA); Law Offices of Reagan Silber & Trevor Pearlman, LLP (Dallas, TX); Wayne A Reaud, Attorney (Beaumont, TX); Steven B. Sandler, Developer (Virginia Beach, VA); Law Offices of Shernoff, Bidart & Darras (Claremont, CA); Wilkes & McHugh PA (Tampa, FL). [$900,000]
$50,000-$100,000 -- $95,000-Shepard A. Hoffman, Attorney (Dallas, TX). $75,000-Joseph W. Cotchett, Attorney (Burlingame, CA); Waters & Kraus (Dallas, TX); Lisa A. Baron, Attorney (Dallas, TX). $58,000-James R. Duffy, Attorney (Uniondale, NY); Lopez, Hodes, Restaino, Milman, Skikos & Polos (Newport Beach, CA). [$436,000]
$50,000 -- Bruce A. Broillet, Attorney (Los Angeles, CA); Russell Budd, Attorney (Dallas, TX); Clifford Law Offices, P.C. (Chicago, IL); Cooney and Cooney (Chicago, IL); Fisher, Boyd, Brown, Boubreaux & Hugeunard (Houston, TX); Wayne Hogan, Attorney (Jacksonville, FL); Thomas A. Moore, Attorney (New York, NY); John M. O'Quinn, Attorney (Houston, TX); Power Rogers & Smith, P.A. (Chicago, IL); Paul S. Minor, Attorney (Biloxi, MS); Weitz & Luxenburg (New York, NY). [$550,000]
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