Fox News reports:
The last person to know that Sen. Max Baucus wanted a divorce may have been his wife of 25 years.
It appears that Wanda Baucus was in the dark even as a member of Baucus’ staff — Melodee Hanes, the woman who is now his live-in girlfriend — was plotting out the senator’s life without a wife.
Hanes, Baucus’ former state director, reportedly met at least twice with the Montana Democrat’s divorce attorney eight months before the senator and his wife separated.
This demolishes the idea that Baucus was separated before he started seeing Hanes. True, this doesn’t have any real bearing on the main story, that Baucus nominated a mistress with flimsy qualifications to be US Attorney. But I do think the fact that Baucus’s relationship with the mistress was already sleazy does cast the scandal in an even worse light.