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.