Edwards Pleads Not Guilty in Campaign Fund Case

John Edwards with his daughter, Cate, outside the Federal Building in Winston-Salem, N.C. on Friday.

John Edwards, the former Democratic senator from North Carolina and nominee for vice president in 2004, was once one of his party’s most promising young stars. But on Friday he found himself in a stunning fall from grace — in a courtroom in North Carolina, being read his rights.

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John Edwards enters the Federal Building in downtown Winston-Salem, N.C. on Friday. A grand jury indicted the two-time presidential candidate, accusing him of trying to protect his political ambitions by soliciting and secretly spending more than $925,000 to hide his mistress and their baby from the public.

Earlier in the day, a federal grand jury indicted him on charges that he violated federal campaign finance laws by “secretly obtaining and using” contributions from wealthy benefactors to conceal his mistress and their baby while he was running for president in 2008.

He pleaded not guilty to the charges and set the stage for a trial that will most likely dredge up embarrassing details of his affair and his betrayal of his wife and those who believed in his campaign. But Mr. Edwards, a skilled trial lawyer, had rejected a chance to avoid a trial through a plea bargain, opting instead to take his chances in front of a jury.

“I will regret for the rest of my life the pain and the harm that I’ve caused to others,” Mr. Edwards told reporters outside the courthouse in Winston-Salem afterward. “But I did not break the law. And I never, ever thought that I was breaking the law.”

The trial was scheduled to begin July 11 in Winston-Salem, but lawyers involved said they expected it would start much later.

The grand jury, which has been investigating the case for two years, indicted Mr. Edwards on six counts — one involving conspiracy, four involving illegal payments and one involving false statements. If he is found guilty, Mr. Edwards, 57, faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines.

Mr. Edwards’s wife, Elizabeth, died of cancer in December. The couple had two young children and an older daughter, Cate, a lawyer, who accompanied Mr. Edwards to court. Mr. Edwards was released without having to post bail, but was ordered to turn in his passport and to avoid talking with potential witnesses.

The indictment contends that Mr. Edwards and his co-conspirators solicited $725,000 from Rachel Mellon, the 100-year-old heiress to the Mellon banking fortune, and $200,000 from Fred Baron, Mr. Edwards’s campaign finance chairman.

The money, the indictment said, was used to cover up his affair with Rielle Hunter, a campaign videographer with whom he had a child, and to pay for her prenatal medical expenses, travel and accommodations.

The fact that Mr. Edwards tried to cover up his affair is not at issue. The Justice Department says that those contributions from two wealthy patrons were campaign donations and therefore subject to federal campaign finance laws that set limits on the amounts that can be donated and received, and require public reporting. Those two donations were well in excess of the limit of $2,300 that an individual can give.

The indictment says the money was actually used for campaign purposes: If the public knew that he was having an affair, his campaign would have been over. (It was over anyway, before he confessed to the affair in August 2008, having lost too many primaries to the political superstars Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, but it might have imploded even earlier, or never even gotten off the ground.)

“Mr. Edwards is alleged to have accepted more than $900,000 in an effort to conceal from the public facts that he believed would harm his candidacy,” Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer said in a statement. “As this indictment shows, we will not permit candidates for high office to abuse their special ability to access the coffers of their political supporters to circumvent our election laws.”

The Edwards defense is that the money was used not for political reasons but for personal reasons: he wanted to conceal the affair from his wife.

The Edwards legal team, headed by Gregory B. Craig, who defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment proceedings, says the government is trying an untested theory and applying a too-broad definition of campaign contributions.

Robbie Brown reported from Winston-Salem, N.C.

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Massey Energy’s Ex-Chief Rejects Finding in Blast

WASHINGTON — Two weeks after an independent government commission concluded that Massey Energy was to blame for the explosion that killed 29 coal miners last year, the company’s former chairman released a report on Thursday disputing the panel’s finding.

The circumstances of the release were peculiar. It was made public this week by Bobby R. Inman, Massey’s former chairman. Mr. Inman no longer has a role in the company, after its purchase last week by Alpha Natural Resources, a Virginia-based company, but he is named in multiple lawsuits by shareholders. In a cover letter on his own letterhead dated Thursday, Mr. Inman said that the report was completed before the merger with Alpha, but that it was held at the request of Alpha executives who wanted to “minimize publicity” pre-sale.

In a terse statement, Alpha stated that it “did not commission or authorize the release of this report or the letter, and was not given the opportunity to review either this report or the letter before their public release.”

Alpha added that it had warned Massey before the merger that it would be “inappropriate” to release any findings before Alpha had a chance to conduct its own review of what happened, a warning that Mr. Inman, a retired Navy admiral, apparently chose not to heed.

“It would have been easy just to let it slide, and I certainly don’t need any additional publicity,” Mr. Inman wrote. He chose to “release the report now on my own,” out of “a strong sense of responsibility for all those who mine coal.”

The 102-page report reiterated Massey’s earlier assertion that the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia on April 5, 2010, was caused by a sudden and massive inundation of natural gas, essentially an “act of God” that would have been impossible to predict or control.

That conclusion directly contradicts the May finding by a commission, led by a former federal mine safety chief, J. Davitt McAteer, that placed the blame for the explosion on Massey’s negligence and culture of putting production over safety.

The Massey report also disputed the panel’s conclusion that coal dust, which had been allowed to accumulate, had carried the explosion through the mine, making it far more lethal than it might otherwise have been.

It defended the mine’s ventilation system, which the commission said had helped create conditions for the blast.

The report spent considerable space detailing what it said were the failures of the federal Mining, Safety and Health Administration, including, it said, secrecy, witness intimidation and obstruction of Massey investigators.

Mr. McAteer disputed that assessment in a telephone interview, and said that some of the report’s conclusions “simply don’t make any sense,” like the assertion that the high levels of natural gas in the mine after the explosion were evidence that a big gas infusion was the cause.

“Quite frankly, that conclusion is uninformed,” Mr. McAteer said, explaining that spikes in methane occur after virtually every mine disaster.

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Hacking of White House E-mail Affected Diverse Departments

WASHINGTON — The computer phishing attack that Google says originated in China was directed, somewhat indiscriminately, at an unknown number of White House staff officials, setting off the Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry that began this week, according to several administration officials.

It is unclear how many White House staff members — or those of other departments in the executive branch — might have been affected, according to two officials with knowledge of the investigation. But the intended victims ranged across various functions in the White House, and were not limited to those working on national security, economic policy or trade areas that would be of particular interest to the Chinese government.

Administration officials said they had no evidence any confidential information was breached, or even that many people fell for the attack by providing information that would allow a breach of their Gmail accounts.

White House classified systems run on dedicated lines and information on those systems, the officials said, cannot be forwarded to Gmail accounts. But investigators were trying to determine if the attackers believed that some staff members or other officials used their personal e-mail accounts for confidential government communications.

“Right now,” said one senior official, “that’s a theory, not a fact.”

Google disclosed the attack this week and said that it was directed at not only American government officials, but also human right activists, journalists and South Korea’s government. Google tracked the attack to Jinan, China, which is the home to a Chinese military regional command center.

But that does not necessarily mean the attackers were Chinese or related to the government. The Chinese government denied any involvement.

The attack used e-mails that appeared to be tailored to their victims, the better to fool them, a technique known as spear phishing. Recipients were asked to click on a link to a phony Gmail login page that gave the hackers access to their personal accounts.

The attacks come as the United States government considers expanding its use of Web-based software for e-mail, along with word processing, spreadsheets and other kinds of documents. Google is one of the many companies vying for the business with its Apps product, as is Microsoft.

Web based e-mail would be vulnerable to hackers who steal login information through phishing attacks. But Web-based systems are not necessarily any easier to hack than traditional e-mail, which a government agency would usually manage using its own servers, said Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute, a computer security firm in Traverse City, Mich.

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said on Thursday that all White House-related electronic mail was supposed to be conducted on work e-mail accounts to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which governs how those communications are protected and archived. Mr. Carney said there was no evidence that any White House accounts were compromised.

White House employees are permitted to have private e-mail accounts, he said, but cannot use them for work purposes.

Officials at the White House and other agencies often keep two computers in their offices, one for unclassified work and another for classified. Senior officials sometimes have a “secure facility” in their homes, in which computers and telephones are on dedicated lines and communications are encrypted.

Given its size, Google and its Gmail system will always make an attractive target.

Other personal e-mail services, including Yahoo and Microsoft’s Hotmail, have faced similar attacks, according to Trend Micro, a computer security company in Cupertino, Calif. “The types of attacks that are happening against Web mail users aren’t confined to Gmail alone and extend to other e-mail platforms,” said Nart Villeneuve, a senior threat researcher for Trend Micro.

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