In her original lawsuit, Regan alleged that a News Corp. executive had pressured her to lie to federal officials investigating then-New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik. Kerik was a favorite of then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and had been nominated to the post of secretary at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2004 at Giuliani’s recommendation. Kerik’s ascension to the position unraveled when it was revealed that he had hired an undocumented alien worker as a nanny; the federal probe News Corp. is alleged to have meddled in was (unrelated to the nanny) a tax fraud investigation that led to Kerik’s imprisonment (he’s now one year into a four-year sentence).

So how is Regan tied to this whole business? It gets even more sordid: the reason she knew Kerik well enough to be of interest in the federal investigation was because the two of them had an affair during the writing, publication and press tour of his 2001 memoir, Lost Son, which was published through an imprint of HarperCollins. Her suit claimed that close ties between higher-ups at News Corp. and then-presidential hopeful Giuliani were behind the push to have her lie to investigators. Because she reached a settlement with News Corp. and signed a non-disclosure agreement, Regan has never said who told her to lie, but the New York Times reports that a recent fee dispute filed by her former lawyers names Roger Ailes, chairman and CEO of Fox News.

It’s now up to the Department of Justice to decide whether to charge Ailes. This weekend, a post from financial writer Barry Ritholtz on his blog, The Big Picture, reported that the DOJ may do just that. Ritholtz said that he recently spoke with someone who was supposed to be hosting Ailes at a March event, but that the executive canceled, citing “legal reasons.” Ritholtz’s source told him that he believes Ailes will be indicted as early as today. Salon reports that Ritholtz’s insider is an “Upper East Side Democrat” whom Ritholtz met by chance at a Barbados airport. While the reliability of Ritholtz’s source cannot be independently verified, Ritholtz wasn’t quite as definitive in an interview with Salon’s Justin Elliott as he was when he put up the post with the title “Roger Ailes to be Indicted.” Ritholtz told Elliott, “If it’s true we’ll find out. If it’s not, no big deal.” Fox News, for one, isn’t speaking on the matter.

“The way the White House is attacking Roger Ailes and Fox,” said Republican strategist Craig Shirley, who is doing media for Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman’s upstart campaign in NY-23, “maybe he is already the president of a country!”

Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.) gave some serious thought to the Ailes question “That’d be tough for him [to win],” said Olson, “just because being at Fox News, there are things they’d come after him about.” Olson looked to the example of Hannah Giles, the young college student who dressed up as a prostitute in the ACORN video sting, and whose grandmother lives in Olson’s district. “There have been all kinds of attacks on her,” he said, referring to legal threats from ACORN.

The White House criticism of Fox has coincided with–and probably contributed to–a healthy surge in the network’s ratings.

While most news channels focused on Sen. John McCain’s big night on Thursday, it was a battle of the B.O.s on Fox News.

Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, made a much-hyped appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor” to tangle with Bill O’Reilly. The talk-show host had been pushing so hard for an Obama visit, of course, his unrequited desire was a big topic at the secret meeting between Obama, NewsCorp head Rupert Murdoch and Fox News chief Roger Ailes.

Ever the showman, O’Reilly turned his new tape into a mini-series — only “Part 1″ aired Thursday (below) — and turned us commentators into previews for the remaining segments. But it was still good television.

Part 1 is about national security, with O’Reilly gingerly mugging as a salt-of-the-earth armchair general. He may pull down $9 million a year, but O’Reilly talks with the cadence and umbrage of any regular guy holding court at the bar — scrunching his face, interrupting, waving his hands and wondering whether Obama is tough enough to take on Iran.

He looked permanently perturbed with Obama’s answers. But he also offered his guest a few compliments. So Obama was correct to oppose the Iraq war as the “wrong battlefield,” O’Reilly observed, but wrong to oppose the surge. (Don’t even bother trying to square that.) Obama gave a good speech in Denver, O’Reilly conceded, but he still “bloviated” about Pakistan.

Obama was cool and cogent throughout, but O’Reilly’s audience presents demographic kryptonite to his political superpowers. Fox News viewers went for Bush by 9:1 last cycle, and prime-time shows — like The Factor — offer an even more conservative spin than daytime programming. Meanwhile, the average age of an O’Reilly viewer is 71. Obama has trouble with older Americans in general, but older Americans who voted for President George W. Bush and tune into O’Reilly? Even they may not be moved by this solid performance: