With $50 million John Edwards could create a foundation that would keep him in the spotlight after losing the presidential nomination, he told a confidante in 2008, and with a wealthy benefactor like Rachel "Bunny" Mellon getting that money would be as easy as "chip shot" in golf. "[Edwards] said he had a friend, Ms. Mellon who was very wealthy," testified Tim Toben, Edward's onetime friend and supporter who helped secret Edwards' pregnant mistress out of North Carolina. It would be "chip shot for her endow the foundation" with $50 million, Toben said Edwards told him in June 2008 at a swank Chapel Hill, N.C., restaurant. Toben said Edwards' boast that evening made him uncomfortable. He knew the truth about Edwards' and his mistress. He even rummaged through her home, removing signed autographs reading "I love you, John," which the senator had given her. But that conversation would resonate with Toben again a year later when he ran into Edwards on the street. By then the world knew Edwards had cheated, and his closest aide Andrew Young, also a friend of Toben and co-conspirator in trying to cover up the affair with Hunter, was getting ready to publish a book about the affair. "You need to choose between your friendship with Andrew and your friendship with me," Edwards said threateningly. Andrew had crossed a line. He was not somebody to be trusted," he said of Young, a longtime aide who Edwards claims tried to bilk millions out of Mellon for his own selfish motives and not to hide Hunter from the public. And then he said something frustrating to me that Andrew had tried to bilk Ms. Mellon out of $50 million. I don't think he remembered, I don't think he remembered a year earlier he told me it would be a 'chip shot' for her to fund the foundation," Toben said. Edwards' defense hinges on his argument that he never personally asked Mellon for any money and that Young acted on his own to solicit money. Toben had a unique insider's view of Edwards's relationship with Hunter, joining them at a Dave Matthews concert and driving a pregnant Hunter to an airplane hanger to get her out of North Carolina and away from an increasingly skeptical press. Also Monday, a staffer testified that Edwards' mistress caused so much turmoil on his presidential campaign that one staffer messaged headquarters from the road pleading to be let off the "traveling freak show." The comment came amid testimony that Edwards' Hunter was lavishly paid by the campaign although the video webisodes she made were so poorly done that the campaign refused to use them.