In Court, the Return of the Edwards Haircut GREENSBORO, N.C. - John Edwards's famous $400 hair cut came back to haunt him on Wednesday. Prosecutors at in his federal corruption trial produced the expense report his campaign filed with the Federal Election Commission during his 2008 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. The document is a critical piece of the prosecution strategy because it suggests that the Edwards camp considered a personal expense a cost of the campaign. The government's case hinges on proving that some of the $1 million that wealthy donors gave to help hide Mr. Edwards's mistress was campaign spending, too--- intended not as a personal gift, as Mr. Edwards contends, but given to influence his presidential bid. Mr. Edwards faces six counts of conspiracy and violating campaign finance law. The prosecution witness in the morning was Jennifer Palmieri, 45, who five months ago joined the White House as deputy communications manager. She had been press secretary for Mr. Edwards and a close friend of his wife, Elizabeth, who died of cancer in 2010. Ms. Palmieri outlined for the jury how the campaign navigated first one and then another article in The National Enquirer that exposed his affair with a campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter, with whom Mr. Edwards conceived a child. When the first Enquirer article was about to be printed, Ms. Palmieri went to Mr. Edwards. "Don't think that if this is true that you'd be able to survive this," she said she had told him. His relationship with his family was what people really liked about him, she told the court. The strategy was to keep the story from "making the jump" to the mainstream press, which worked for a while. But there were signs that rumors about Ms. Hunter's pregnancy might be true. Ms. Palmieri recounted an emotional meeting in a hotel room in Iowa in 2007. Mrs. Edwards had just found out that people close to her were still seeing Ms. Hunter and even taking her on shopping trips to Los Angeles. They included Fred Baron -- the campaign finance chairman who later paid to support Ms. Hunter, the baby and an Edwards aide who had agreed to falsely claim paternity -- and Mr. Baron's wife, Lisa Blue Baron. Mrs. Edwards, who did not yet know about the pregnancy or that the affair was continuing, was very upset. She wanted to know why they were continuing a relationship with a woman Mrs. Edwards wanted out of their lives. According to Ms. Palmieri, Ms. Blue told her, "You've got to hold your friends close and your enemies closer." Mr. Edwards seemed oddly silent during the tearful scene in the hotel room, she said. "I found it a little unnerving," Ms. Palmieri said. She went on to describe Mr. Edwards's plan to go on ABC Television to discuss the affair, in the hope that it would be enough to keep the press from discovering the pregnancy. Ms. Palmieri said she and others in the Edwards inner circle tried to talk him out of it. Although Mr. Edwards's personal aide, Andrew Young, had claimed paternity of the baby, Ms. Palmieri did not believe it. "It makes John look more and more guilty," Ms. Palmieri said. For Mrs. Edwards, the interview was a terrible idea. "She just wanted to get her family out of this intact and get it behind them and go back to private life," Ms. Palmieri told the court.