VIDEO EXTRA: Edwards paid $100,000-plus to woman's company

Former presidential candidate John Edwards admitted Friday he had had an extramarital affair with a woman who produced videos for his campaign.

Acknowledging a sex scandal he had dismissed as “tabloid trash” only last month, Edwards said he had told his wife and family long ago but “I had hoped that it would never become public.”

He denied fathering a daughter, born to the woman with whom he had the affair, and offered to be tested to prove it. A former Edwards campaign staff member professes to be the father.

In 2006, Edwards’ political action committee paid $100,000 in a four-month span to a newly formed firm run by Hunter, who directed the production of four Web videos showing Edwards in supposedly candid moments as well as in a public speech talking about morality.

The payments from Edwards’ One America Committee to Midline Groove Productions LLC started on July 5, 2006, five days after Hunter incorporated the firm in Delaware.

Midline provided “Website/Internet services,” according to reports that Edwards’ PAC filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Midline’s work product consists of four YouTube videos showing Edwards in informal settings as he prepares to make speeches in Storm Lake, Iowa, and Pittsburgh, as he prepares for an appearance on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and travels in Uganda in 2006.

Edwards’ PAC followed the six-figure payment with two smaller payments totaling $14,461, the last on April 1, 2007.

At the time Hunter was compiling the videos in 2006, Edwards was preparing his run for president.

Episode One of the four videos shows a conversation between Edwards and an unseen woman as the two chat aboard a plane about an upcoming speech in Storm Lake, Iowa.

Cutting between clips of the speech and the conversation with the woman, Edwards touches on his standard political themes, declaring that government must do a better job of addressing the great issues of the day, from poverty and education to jobs and the war in Iraq.

“I want to see our party lead on the great moral issues — yes, me a Democrat using that word — the great moral issues that face our country,” Edwards tells the crowd. “If we want to live in a moral, honest just America and if we want to live in a moral and just world, we can’t wait for somebody else to do it. We have to do it.”