Founding Brothers (Stanley Kurtz)

National Review ^ | 9/24/08 | Stanley Kurtz

[NoobRep]

Founding Brothers What’s behind Obama’s early rise?

By Stanley Kurtz

New evidence strongly suggests that Barack Obama has been less than forthcoming about the role that unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers may have played in choosing him to lead the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, I have obtained an e-mail message from former CAC executive director, Ken Rolling, to Warren Chapman and Anne Hallett, two of CAC’s three co-founders. Bill Ayers was the third founder. In Rolling’s message, sent the morning after I first requested access to CAC records housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), he admits to avoiding a reporter’s inquiries about who picked Obama to head CAC. Rolling also appears to prime Chapman and Hallett to avoid telling the press the whole story of how Obama was chosen, and provides them with an apparently incomplete story to use instead. Although it’s too early to draw definitive conclusions from this evidence, it does raise serious questions about Barack Obama’s own account of the process by which he was chosen as CAC board chair.

My FOIA request to UIC yielded several documents, most of which had already been provided to University of Chicago law student Jason Wilcox through an earlier FOIA request. The documents produced by the Wilcox request have been described and discussed in detail by Steve Diamond at his “Global Labor and Politics” blog.

Important new information has also been added by a story in the Chicago Tribune.

Based on all of this material, let’s reconstruct what happened behind the scenes, beginning on August 11, 2008, the day I first contacted UIC requesting access to the CAC archives.

[NoobRep]

It looks like Kurtz and Steve Diamond are now corresponding. Our best chance to get this story blown wide open. This is a fascinating read and some of Kurtz' best work yet on the Ayers/Obama connection.

[fightinJAG]

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[bjc]

This is interesting, but there is no smoking gun, yet. It hardly seem possible that there are no contemporaries of Obama/Ayers who cannot provide more insight to the current paper trail. Are there no human sources?

[NoobRep]

I truly believe there is something out there that will sink Obama in regards to Ayers and someone has it securely stored away until the right time. I would suspect you’ll see a smoking gun in a few weeks, where there isn’t much time left for Osama/Obama to respond. In other words, its the “October Surprise.”