Posted on 07/07/2004 4:49:46 PM PDT by Key West Girl
Look for the dirty laundry in Edwardss closet
July 7, 2004 | Dick Morris | The Political Life
The cheering that surrounds John Kerrys choice of John Edwards for vice president may fade quickly if the Bush campaigns 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 Edwardss 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.
Bushs 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 Kerrys face, just as Geraldine Ferraro did in Walter Mondales and Thomas Eagleton did in McGoverns. 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 Clintons (D-N.Y.) memoir, Living History.
Trial Lawyers Help Edwards Make His Case
Excerpt from The Buying of the President 2004 Follows the Edwards Money Trail
June 25, 2004
In 1981, John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, moved from Nashville, Tennessee, to North Carolina, where Edwards was raised. Elizabeth took a job as an attorney at one of Raleigh's leading bankruptcy law firms, while Edwards joined a firm known for its criminal defense work, Tharrington Smith & Hargrove. He was soon asked by Wade Smith, one of the firm's founders and a former chairman of the state Democratic Party, to take on a malpractice case. Edwards turned down several settlement offers, according to The New Yorker, including one for $750,000 made just before the case went to the jury. Ultimately, Edwards won a damage award of $3.7 million for his client, his first million-dollar verdict and a record in North Carolina at the time. The following year, 1985, Edwards won a $6.5 million judgment for a 6-year-old girl who'd suffered brain damage at Pitt Memorial Hospital in Greenville.
Edwards went on to try no fewer than 63 major cases during the 1990s and, according to media reports, brought in more than $152 million for his clients, almost all of whom were victims of medical malpractice. He became so admired and so feared that doctors would settle cases for millions of dollars rather than face him at trial. The high-stakes victories earned Edwards and law partner David Kirby the Association of Trial Lawyers of America's national award for public service. The courtroom conquests also netted Edwards an invitation to join the Inner Circle of Advocates, the exclusive, secretive club of 100 lawyers who have won multimillion-dollar verdicts.
Edwards gave up his law practice in 1998 and parlayed his fame and personal wealthfinancial disclosures put his worth at between $13.7 million and $38.6 millioninto a seat in the U.S. Senate. He went from relative obscurity to front-runner status against Democratic primary opponent D.G. Martin, who was well established in local politics as a former lobbyist and two-time congressional candidate. The political greenhorn won the primary and won again against his Republican rival, incumbent Senator Lauch Duncan Faircloth.
The campaign against Faircloth was financed largely through two sources: the wealth Edwards won in the courtroom (he loaned his campaign $3.2 million from personal funds) and contributions from attorneys from around the country. In fact, his deep-pocketed supporters have been drawn from the ranks of his professional brethren, America's personal injury lawyerscolleagues Edwards has willingly tapped throughout his political life for their resources, connections, and riches.
Trial lawyers, records show, have been his most generous contributors. Of Edwards' top 25 career patrons, 22 are fellow members of the plaintiffs' bar. (The remaining three are soft money mogul and movie producer Stephen Bing, Goldman Sachs Group, and Wakefield Development, a real estate developer.) In early fundraising for his White House run Edwards relied heavily on his fellow lawyers, some of whom have been generous beyond what federal election law allows.
We were trying to figure out what a secretary in Alabama earns these days when the Senator's campaign announced it would return $10,000 to employees of a Little Rock, Arkansas, law firm after one law clerk acknowledged that she expected her boss to pay her back for her $2,000 donation. Michelle D. Abu-Halmeh said that her boss, Tab Turner of Turner & Associates (SUV rollovers), "asked for people to support Edwards," and said "he would reimburse us." Mr. Turner then told reporters that he wasn't reimbursing her, because "apparently" it was illegal to do so. Apparently?
a.) The convention is not over.
b.)The November surprize has not occured.
-or-
c.)Hillary has decided to torpedo this election cycle and clear the deck for 2008.
Take your pick. It is still going to be a fun and action-packed season!
You are the master of ping. I love them!
Very interesting, and sad. None of them have any morals anymore and they call the President a liar and deceiver!!
bttt
"Lawyer talk".
LOL! Good pic ! :^D
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 Edwardss 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.
Here is the ATLAs Logo
these are better:
And from my neck of the woods:
Edwards: "Your mouthwash just ain't cuttin' it!!"
They are both master liars and it comes naturally to look someone in the eye and lie through your teeth at the same time.
The John-John Manboy Love ASSociation is run by two trial lawyers - the FIT RIGHT IN.
Hillary and Beel are both lawyers.
Three paramedics were boasting about their respective ambulance team's response times. "With our new satellite navigation system," bragged one, "we've cut our emergency response time by ten percent." The second paramedic commented. "By using a computer model of traffic patterns, we we cut our average time by 20 percent." "That's nothing said the third paramedic. "Since our ambulance driver passed the bar exam, we've cut our emergency response time in half!"
But I did "borrow" it first. 8^D
Competitive Graphics, eh? I don't know what would make me crack one of those books.
Not a pro, but FReepmail me with question; maybe I can assist in keeping you away from those b-b-b-books.
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