former presidential candidate, john edwards. boil it all down, edwards won. prosecutors alleged he knowingly and willingly accepted $1 million from two wealthy donors to hide his mistress, rielle hunter. the jury deadlocked on the other five counts, including conspiracy, illegal con trib g contributions and making false statements. outside the courthouse, edwards, who had said virtually nothing except good morning during this trial spoke publicly. >> all i can say is thank goodness we live in the couldn't interest i that has the kind of system that we have. i think those jurors were exemplar for what jurors were supposed to do. they were very, very impressive. the second thing i want to say just a word about is responsibility. this is about me. i want to make sure that everyone hears from me and from my voice that while i do not believe i did anything illegal or ever thought i was doing anything illegal, i did an awful, awful lot that was wrong. there is no one else responsible for my sins. none of the people who came to court and testified are responsible. nobody working for the government is responsible. i am responsible. if i want to find the person who should be held accountable for my sins, honestly, i don't have to go any further than the mirror. it is me. it is me and me alone. next thing i want to say a word about is the people that i love. it has been an incredible experience for me to watch my parents, my dad just turned 80. my mom, who is 78 tromp up here in robbins, north carolina, every day to be with me and to support me. i love them so much. they did such a wonderful job raising me and my brother, blake and my sister, kathy, who i also love dearly. i also want to say a word about my own children. kate, who all of you have seen, has been here every single day. she has been here no matter what, no matter how awful and painful. a lot of the evidence was for her. evidence about her dad, evidence about her mom, who she loves so, so dearly. but she never once flinched. she said, dad, i love you. i will be there for you no matter what. i am so proud to have had her with me through all this process. finally, emma, who turned 14 recently, emma claire and jack, who just turned 12, who i take care of every day. i have not been able to see them quite as much but i see them in the morning. i get their breakfast ready and get them off to school and then we get home at night and we all eat supper together. i love them both so dearly. they are such an important part of every day of my life. then, finally, my precious quinn, who i love more than any of you could ever imagine. and i am so close to and so, so grateful for, so grateful for quinn. i am grateful for all of my children, including my son, wade, who we lost years ago. this is the last thing i am going to say. i don't think god is true with me. i really believe he thinks there is still some good things that i can do. whatever happens with this legal stuff going forward, what i am hopeful about is all those kids that i have seen in the poorest parts of this country and in some of the poorest places in the world that i can help them in whatever way i am still capable of helping them. i want to dedicate my life to being the best dad i can be and to help those kids who i think deserve help and who i hope i can help. thank you all very much. >> our senior correspondent, joe johns, has covered the trial in greensboro, north carolina. jeffrey toobin and sunny hostin, joe, i want to start with you. you are there throughout the trial. you also know edwards from his career in politics. he said little to anybody except spaul talk. good morning. how are you during the trial. he decided not to testify. then, that very powerful and emotional statement there. take us to that moment. >> the first thing i thought of was, here is the statement he would have said to the jury had he testified but he would have been subject to cross-examination john, which would have been a huge problem for him. he might have not gotten this result in this trial, which was actually very good for him. you certainly saw there a measure of contrition that we haven't seen before, sort of embracing his daughter, quinn, the daughter he had with his mistress, rielle hunter, while his wife, elizabeth edwards, was dying of cancer. then, at the end, sort of footnoting the kind of twilight zone moment we have had here in greensboro. you almost sort of saw this pivot of john edwards very quickly towards a measure of rehabilitation by talking about helping poor kids around the country and the world. this is sort of an echo from something he has been saying for a long time, one of the reasons perhaps he actually wanted to go ahead and fight this fight so that he could keep his law license, stay out of jail, because he said he wanted to start a poverty law practice. perhaps the beginning of john edwards' new life presuming the justice department doesn't decide to retry these five charges that he got a mistrial on. >> let's come to that question. i heard you earlier. very smart legal. this is why you went to law school. calling this a mess. it was a mess. it is also a very complicated case. there were questions about whether the justice department should have done this in the first place, should have tried to bring this to trial. do you see any possibility they would say, let's do it again? >> i think it is an extremely remote possibility that this case will be retried. let's start with the fact that he has been acquitted of one count. double jeopardy clause, that's all she wrote on that case, on that count. there would be an argument that the government would be precluded from making some arguments that it made in the initial trial. plus, this case was tried at great length and expense where everyone who knows the federal sentencing guidelines knew that a minimal jail sentence would be the likely outcome. even if he was convicted on all counts. we kept repeating that he was eligible for 30 years. he would never have gotten 30 years. he might have gotten one year. he is certainly not going to get any time if it ends here an even in a retrial, he wouldn't have gotten it. the deterrent effect, which is something that is often talked about when the prosecution decides whether to bring back a case, how many cases are like this? this case is so bizarre. the facts are so strange. it is unlikely to occur or deter other people from potentially violating the campaign laws in the way the judgment department alleged. i don't see any rational for going forward with this case. john edwards is humiliated, discredited, appropriately out of american politics. i don't see any reason why this case should go forward. i don't think the justice department should do it. >> sunny, in this case where the federal government losing a case, did they overtry or have too many charges or try too hard or make it more complicated than they needed to. is there a lesson to be learned on how the case was prosecuted? >> the lesson is, you just don't try these type of cases. this was an unprecedented use of campaign finance laws. it has never happened in terms of the theory the government was using, the way they were trying to interpret the law and bring this case. i agree with jeff. i suspect we will not see john edwards facing any other trial on the five remaining counts. i suspect the government will not be bringing any cases like this. this is a case of anything that would have been a civil case. perhaps a case that the fec would have looked at but not a criminal case in federal criminal court in north carolina. many people are now, rightfully so asking why even bring the case. was this politically motivated? >> just one point. john edwards thanked a lot of people. one person he didn't thank was abbey lowell and his defense team who did a phenomenal job in not an easy case. this he deserve a lot of credit. they won and the justice department lost. >> john and jeff and sunny, appreciate your insights. we are going to turn our attention to a feisty day in the 2012 case. both the romney and obama campaigns deciding to get into each other's face. we will hear from david axlerod. >> the guy ducking his record is governor romney. every time a local business opens its doors or creates another laptop bag or hires another employee, it's not just good for business, it's good for the entire community. at bank of america, we know the impact that local businesses have on communities. that's why we extended $6.4 billion in new credit to small businesses across the country last year. because the more we help them, the more we help make opportunity possible. in here, great food demands a great presentation. so at&t showed corporate caterers how to better collaborate by using a mobile solution, in a whole new way. using real-time photo sharing abilities, they can create and maintain high standards, from kitchen to table. this technology allows us to collaborate 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[ male announcer ] one pill a day. 24 hours. zero heartburn. now to a day of crackling exchanges between the obama and romney campaign. a fight on the massachusetts state house, democrats led by top obama strategist, david axlerod. governor romney raised spending by 6.5%. his proposals were for 8%. this group of people reigned him in and exercised some responsibility. so you know we all know he actually vetoed 800 bills along the way, almost all of them overridden. most of them for the benefit of republican primary voters in other states shall not for purposes of governor nance. he was a drive-by governor on his way for running for president of the united states. >> you might hear the heckling and booing. that was romney supporters who turned out to disrupt the event. david axlerod more than happy to engage them. >> it is great to be in massachusetts obama country. i get tweets in some of these folks, so i feel close to them. >> you can shout that down but it is hard to etch a sketch the truth away. >> not to be undone. governor romney staged his own bit of political theater taking it to the bankrupt green energy company, solyndra. obama gave them more than half a million dollars in stimulus funds. they suggest the warnings were ignored because some company officials were big obama campaign donors. >> this building, this half a billion dollar taxpayer investment represents a serious conflict of interest on the par of the president and his team. it is also a symbol of how the president thinks about free enterprise. free enterprise to the president means taking money from the taxpayers and giving it freely to his friends. >> the presumptive gop nominee responded to the boston event attacking his record as governor. >> when i was governor of massachusetts, we took the unemployment rate from 5.6% to 4.7%. i think that's a pretty good number. my guess is the people of america would be very pleased if they could see a number like 4.7%. i would hope to be able to get there if i were president. >> our chief white house correspondent, jessica yellin is here and jim acosta is with us as well. jess, to you first, what was the overriding goal of going into governor romney's backyard? >> the obama team is trying to attack mitt romney's central case for the presidency, which is his claim that he is an expert at creating jobs. they keep pointing to the statistics that he was 47th in the nation at job creation and that its growth in moving the unemployment numbers down was more sluggish than the rest of the nation. even politifact agrees with that fact. now, they are saying he applied that lesson to his record as governor and it showed he wasn't that great at creating jobs. that's their argument. they will go on to make a case that you will see in the olympics in a different way when he ran that. they are trying to make the case that just because he was so good at making money doesn't mean he is that great at making jobs. he will hit back on that. >> he did so today. let's get out to jim acosta. we knew the david axlerod event was coming. they told us about that yesterday. solyndra was kept a secret until the last minute. why? >> a little bit of cloak and dagger out here on the west coast a romney adviser got on the press bus. we had not been told where we were headed but that the romney adviser said, we are headed to solyndra. the reason we are engaging in secrecy is because we are concerned that president obama would try to block the romney campaign from having this event out here thichlts a firm that received half billion dollars in stimulus money through loan guarantees. they were concerned that the obama campaign or president obama himself would try to block them from having this campaign event here. we asked mitt romney about that. he wouldn't go that that are. he would only say, people out there who don't want this story to get out. i have to tell you, a lot of us were already placing our bets, making some educated guesses and when we got here, there were some satellite trucks here, even ours. we did guess right. we were coming to solyndra. they could have taken us to alcatraz. >> how much is a reaction to them knowing the obama campaign is going piece by piece through the romney resume? how many of that is a reaction saying, fine, you are going to go piece by piece through the presidency? >> that's what's happening right now. this is going back and forth. they were being very secretive about what happened today. take a look at the message discipline that the romney campaign had with this event. there were no protesters or off-script moments out here. contrast that with what happened in boston which was really sort of a circus for the obama campaign. not a clear victory from a publics relation standpoint. romney had a clean event here but there is the issue of timing. as mitt romney stepped off his press bus, all the news networks were switching over to the white house to cover the president with the portrait hanging that was going on with former george w. bush. not exactly a win/win for either side. >> a little advanced 101 failure. you say olympics. they are going to keep going with this. the country has some pretty big fundamental issues. both campaigns are going to play. >> the obama team's attack on the romney record is to try to chip away at this argument that he is an expert at creating jobs because he was so successful in the private sector to something that jim said. i'm not sure how the president of the united states would stop any candidate from doing an event anywhere on its face. it is the united states of america. you can do a public event on a public street. i would explain that i have talked to a number of senior republican strategists and explained that the sol indra criticism of the president has been going on for a long time. it is really an attempt to discredit him on not just his ethical moral standing, that he is seen as this ethical president but also to go with this argument that he is not ready for the job. >> can't pick a winner. >> right. >> jessica, jim, this is going to go on 159 more ways. a lot more in your face. i suspect we will hear from david axlerod to his response to the romney's accusations of cronyism. why new york city officials want to ban super size servings of sugary soft drinks. so we invented a warning.. you can feel. introducing the all new cadillac xts, available with the patented safety alert seat. when there is danger you might not see, you're warned by a pulse in the seat. it's technology you won't find in a mercedes e-class. the all new cadillac xts has arrived. and it's bringing the future forward. welcome back. here is kate bolduan with the latest news you need to know now. >> you have been more busy than i have. >> you have been busy as well. let's get you caught up on all the other headlines. the u.s. court of appeals in boston declared a major part of the defensive marriage act unconstitutionaled to. the law, known as doma, defines legal marriage as a union between one man and one woman. >> in the house today, they rejected a bill imposing criminal penalties for abortion based on the sex of a fetus. most republicans supported the bill calling it a matter of protecting the rights of the unborn. it did not get the two-thirds majority it needed under a hurry-up procedure republicans leaders used to bring the bill to the floor quickly. new york may be the city that never sleeps but new yorkers might no have sugary drinks to help them out and keep them awake for much longer. they are proposing to ban large size sodas and sugary beverageses. major bloomberg tweeted his support saying more than half of nyc adults, 58%, are overweight or obese. we are doing something about that. the big gulp is going to be a collector's item? man, what is the world coming to. >> it is a tough call. childhood obesity and diabetes is a health crisis but then you ask, is this the government's job? >> fascinating debate but i love me a big gulp. >> you know, what i might say next will get me in trouble. so i will stop right there. kate, we will see you in a little bit. much more ahead on the john edwards trial. you will hear him after the jury gave his verdict. the obama campaign, senior strategist, david axlerod answers mitt romney's claim that he knows better than the president when it comes to creating jobs. >> he is misrepresenting himself when he calls himself a job creator. that is not what he was in his business or what he was as governor. a living breathing intelligence bringing people together to bring new ideas to life. look. it's so simple. 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