Both cases involved money and uncomfortable discussion of the lawmakers’ private lives. Why Edwards won, McDonnell lost

Why is Bob McDonnell looking at years in a federal prison while John Edwards is walking free?

The federal government dragged both men into court on charges stemming from their role in public life: Edwards for alleged campaign finance violations relating to his mistress and McDonnell for receiving gifts from a Virginia businessman. Both cases involved large sums of money and uncomfortable discussion of the politicians’ private lives. And they contributed to the notion that politicians operate in a sphere far removed from that of working Americans.


Going into Edwards’ trial, his reputation was in tatters over his highly-publicized affair with videographer Rielle Hunter. Edwards’s life became fare for the national tabloids, which repeatedly noted that his dalliance took place as his wife Elizabeth was dying of cancer.

( Also on POLITICO: The McDonnell verdict's lesson)

McDonnell, by contrast, was a relatively well-liked and successful governor whose reputation took a hit late in his term as word emerged of the gifts he and his family received from Star Scientific CEO Jonnie Williams Jr. Even as the details of the federal investigation spilled out late last year, McDonnell retained the support of half of Virginia voters.

Juries in federal courthouses about 200 miles apart in sleepy, mid-sized cities in the border South considered the evidence. But the results were wildly different: McDonnell was convicted of 11 felonies, while Edwards’s jury acquitted him on one count and hung on five others, prompting the feds to drop the case.

Here’s POLITICO’s guide to six ways McDonnell’s defense went sour while Edwards’s succeeded:

1) It all came down to the Rolex

McDonnell was caught with hand in the cookie jar — up to his wrist.

Unlike Edwards, McDonnell was seen as personally profiting from the largesse of a political backer, while the money prosecutors argued was chipped in to aid the ex-senator never went to him directly.

( PHOTOS: Bob and Maureen McDonnell's trial)

McDonnell could not escape evidence like the photo showing him smiling while showing off the $6,500 watch. His claims that he didn’t know Williams paid for it didn’t seem to persuade jurors. The pictures of him riding around in Williams’s Ferrari didn’t help his defense much either.

Prosecutors argued that the value of the expenses involved in Edwards’s case was about $900,000 — far higher than the $165,000 McDonnell and his family were accused of taking. But the money two friends of Edwards put out went to cover expenses incurred by Hunter to stay at lavish hotels and travel by private jet. It was also paid out when Edwards was a presidential candidate, not a senator.

“I talked to multiple Edwards jurors who were telling me: ‘He never touched the money.’ Here, you have indisputable visual evidence of McDonnell being on the receiving end of the benefit,” said Hampton Dellinger, a trial attorney who works in North Carolina and Washington, D.C. “That doesn’t necessarily end the legal inquiry but for jurors’ visceral gut reactions to the cases, it could be a good distinction.”

One McDonnell case juror said in a post-trial interview that it was clear the gifts McDonnell and his family took were directly linked to his public office. Kathleen Carmody told the Washington Post that jurors asked themselves: “Would the McDonnells have received these gifts if Bob McDonnell weren’t governor?…. [The] facts speak for themselves.”

( WATCH: McDonnell corruption trial recap)

Edwards’s legal team, headed by D.C. lawyer Abbe Lowell, argued that the ex-senator would have tried to hush up his affair with Hunter — and her ensuing pregnancy — even if he wasn’t running for president. Prosecutors said it was implausible that friendship alone would prompt anyone to pay up $900,000 to cover another person’s extramarital affair, but some of the payments did continue after Edwards’s presidential campaign was clearly doomed.

“Edwards was able to put in jurors’ minds whether the cover-up of the affair would have taken place regardless of whether he was running for president, that he wasn’t as much trying to save his candidacy as save his marriage,” Dellinger said.

2) When it’s all about sex, jurors recoil

Both cases offered awkward testimony about the prominent political couples’ marriages. In the McDonnell case, their union was on the table from the outset since both the governor and his wife, Maureen, were criminally charged. But the focus on marital strife came from the defense, with Maureen’s lawyer arguing at the outset of the trial that the couple’s marriage was “broken.”

( Also on POLITICO: McDonnells convicted of corruption)

At the Edwards trial, the ex-senator’s extramarital affair was the central theme and a frequent topic of discussion. Jurors even heard about Elizabeth Edwards ripping her blouse open to expose her scars from breast cancer surgery. In a page torn from the playbook used to fight President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, John Edwards’s defense suggested the federal government had spent millions investigating the tabloid tale of whether a man had a secret love child.

Prosecutors undoubtedly wanted to make Edwards seem like a bad person, but the focus on the personal may have backfired, fueling questions about the public interest served by the case.

3) Unlikable politicians should stay off the stand

Both Edwards and McDonnell are trial lawyers and politicians, confident in their own abilities to win over a crowd — or a jury.

But Edwards passed up his opportunity to lay it all out in court. The decision protected him a lengthy from cross-examination that would have surely led him through every alleged misdeed.

McDonnell went the other route, choosing to testify on his own behalf. He spent five days on the witness stand, two of them in grueling cross-examination. Jurors don’t seem to have bought his explanations that Williams’s largesse was driven solely by friendship.

“Edwards everyone knows wanted nothing more than to try to explain his side of the story the jury, but he ultimately decided to stay silent. McDonnell went another route,” noted Dellinger, now with Boies, Schiller & Flexner. “Politicians are compelling figures that lead jurors to have strong opinions. There’s a real risk when you’re a charismatic figure like that in taking the stand as a criminal defendant.”

4) Don’t throw your wife under the bus

Even if McDonnell was insistent on taking the stand, his suggestions that his wife was acting without his knowledge may have rubbed jurors the wrong way.

“He was rendered more unlikable for throwing his wife under the bus at trial,” said one prominent D.C. defense lawyer.

Edwards’s defense worked hard to paint the couple’s relationship as complicated and intense, but devoted to each other despite the infidelity. The strategy may have rehabilitated the ex-senator a bit and fed the defense narrative that the affair was hidden to avoid hurting his ailing wife.

5) Campaigns are an ethical cesspool, but governing shouldn’t be

One unintentionally comical moment in the Edwards trial came when prosecutors told jurors that donors were limited to giving $2,300 per candidate in each election. The assertion must have been baffling since the trial took place in 2012 as headlines were filled with reports of figures like Sheldon Adelson spending tens of millions of dollars on candidates like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.

There are fine legal distinctions between the spending, of course, but jurors in the Edwards case seem to have accepted that campaigns are a kind of ethical cesspool where money flows freely and lying is commonplace. Whether McDonnell’s jury feels the same way about campaigns isn’t clear, but they sent a clear message Thursday that politicians should not get the all’s-fair-in-campaigns pass when trying to leverage their office for personal gain.

6) A prosecutor who learned from experience

If the prosecution outmaneuvered the defense to chalk up a win at McDonnell’s trial, some of that can likely be traced to the fact that one key member of the prosecution team in Richmond chalked up what amounted to an embarrassing loss in Greensboro.

David Harbach of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section delivered the closing arguments at both trials and he seems to have learned from mistakes at the earlier one.

In the Edwards case, prosecutors opened with Andrew Young, an unappealing former Edwards aide who was picked apart by the defense. In the McDonnell case, the prosecution led off with a caterer who took $15,000 from Williams to pay for McDonnell’s daughter’s wedding reception and then from the daughter herself. Calling Williams to the stand later may have signaled that he wasn’t the linchpin of the government’s case.

The prosecution also rolled out a relatively full cast of characters in McDonnell’s case, while in Edwards several pivotal players were never called: elderly donor Rachel Bunny Mellon, donor Fred Baron (understandably since he died in 2008), and the mistress, Hunter. Jurors may have felt that key facts were being hidden from them, something they will often hold against the prosecution after being told by the judge that the defense has no duty to present any evidence.