joe johns is in the courtroom. he s outside the courtroom in greensboro, north carolina. we have our jeffrey toobin, senior legal analyst, helping us along, along with ray lynn johnson and as well as our own sun yib hostin who has been good enough to join us. joe, first to you. it s hard to do it quickly, i know, and briefly. bring our viewers up to speed what we know right now and what we re waiting for. reporter: what we know is this is a six-count indictment against john edwards and the jury has indicated to the judge in the courtroom that they have reached a verdict on count three of that six-count indictment. that count three relates to a charge of accepting illegal campaign donations in the year 2008 from rachel bunny mellon, a 101-year-old woman who lives in upperville, virginia, very rich, it s right outside of middleburg, virginia, and she had taken upon herself to give jon edwards several hundred thousand dollars which according to one of her friends was griffin
broken, conspiracy and false statements being made. so, karen, is it possible that he would be just convicted for lying and it looks like there might be a good case there and for conspiring with fred baron to somehow keep rielle hunter out of the political realm so people wouldn t know about it and he could continue with his campaign and with the image of being a good family man in order to win votes? i think that s pretty obvious that large part of the motivation here was his campaign. and has projected himself as a family values, family first type candidate. i think the conspiracy count is probably pretty easy. the false statement, of course, comes n the failure to disclose these expenditures on the campaign finance reports. my guess is let me finish, please, i think it s very important for the defense to make the legal argument in front of the judge as opposed to the jury that the character of this
house. he is inside of the courthouse in winston salem courthouse. and you can see it in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, but we are expecting john edwards along with the defense attorney to walk in front of a crowd of reporters, and we will bring it to you live as soon as we see it, but i know that my pal, joe johns, has been out there off and on covering the story, and he has literally walked outside of the courtroom. joe, first, talk me through what you have just experienced inside of the courtroom. you saw edwards, himself, in front of the magistrate, and how did he appear and what did he say? did you see his daughter with him as well? i didn t see his daughter. and it is funny, you know, i have covered john edwards for a long time, and i have to tell you that it looked like the exact same john ed warwards not hair out of place. i have known his lawyer for a long time and been around town for about 15 years. he looks like he has aged immensely and has gray ha
an affair and pay his mistress. edwards attorney says known was not a campaign donation but a gift from two edwards supporters. joe johns is following the latest developments and he joins us by phone from near raleigh, north carolina. joe, you ve been following the twists and turns how this unfolded. what do we know about the specific counts against edwards now? reporter: the indictment, as i looking through it, has a lot of the information we expected to be in there, essentially, illegal campaign contributions, a number of counts on that. there s a conspiracy count and the other thing is the thing we ve been looking for forever since we really heard about this case, a false statements count. that is essentially, that edwards was able to falsify wilfully conceal, cover up and otherwise keep information out of the public eye about contributions that he received from at least two individuals we ve talked about again and again. that would be a woman named bunny melon, a phila
they can probably easily charge him under the espionage act. holding on to him violates the law. how do you draw a principle difference between what wikileaks as done and what mainstream news organizations like the new york times, the guardian and perhaps msnbc news has done in further publicizing them because they retained them, too. can they draw a distinction, can they say that wick i can loki they say that wick i can loklead as a middle man, operating in a different way than news organizations. of course, the government s case would be much easier that f. they could show that somehow wikileaks and private manning were in a hocahoots, they didn merely receive them but they egged him on or encouraged him or had some role. than there could be a conspiracy count. there s been suggestion they had some evidence of that, some communication, e-mail, traffic between bradley manning and