Bill Ayers wife, Bernadine Dohrn, worked with Michelle Obama at Sidley Austin in the 1980's?!

Various sources | 10-09-08 | Me

[jrooney]

Bill Ayers wife, Bernadine Dohrn who was a leader of the weather undergound and a domestic terrorist that advocated violence against innocent Americans, worked with Michelle Obama at Sidley Austin in the 1980's it has been reported by various sources.

[ravingnutter]

This is a red herring.

Maybe so, but where there is a stench, there is Obama. Here is the connection we need to hammer them with:

Michelle Obama organized a University of Chicago panel about Bill Ayers's crime book in November 1997, just as the battle over the juvenile justice bill was heating up. That panel featured appearances by some of the key figures discussed in Ayers's book, along with Obama himself, who was identified in the press release as "working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system." In effect, then, this public event was a joint Obama-Ayers effort to sink the juvenile justice bill-Obama's decision to plug Ayers's book in the Chicago Tribune the following month was part of the same political effort.

Weekly Standard

So...Obama's denial doesn't cut it. Here is a screen shot from the University Website:

[GovernmentShrinker]

It does make one wonder about Sidley Austin, though, and about its clients. Why would a major law firm be employing someone who has confessed to carrying out bombings, and been convicted of aggravated battery and bail jumping? This is one of the largest corporate law firms in the US, and does work for a long list of respectable corporate clients. You would think some of their big revenue clients would raise a major stink about their employing attorneys with backgrounds like this.

[E=MC2]

The other issue is how terrorists and radicals like Ayres, Dorn, and Angela Davis, are allowed to teach in American Univerisities. HTF does that happen? I suspect they are hired by lesser profile radicals who have inserted themselves in university administrations all over the country.

No. She was hired top-down as an adjunt without the faculty being able to vote on it.

Check out the Ayers' father (Thomas), Howard Trienes, chairman of the board of Northwestern U connections.

[stockpirate]

It was a general pratice of the Weather underground to have sex with each others partners...............

[Wil H]

It does make one wonder about Sidley Austin, though, and about its clients. Why would a major law firm be employing someone who has confessed to carrying out bombings, and been convicted of aggravated battery and bail jumping?

Here is your answer.

Read the whole article from link at Posting 20 of this thread, it is excellent.

Ayers’s father, Tom Ayers, a prominent Chicago businessman, was also deeply involved in the reform effort. Interestingly, in 1988, while Obama and Ayers toiled on the same education agenda, Bernadine Dohrn worked as an intern at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin — even though she could not be admitted to the bar due to her contempt conviction for refusing to cooperate in a terrorist investigation. How could that happen? It turns out that Sidley was the longtime outside counsel for Tom Ayers’s company, Commonwealth Edison. That is, Ayers’ father had pull at the firm and successfully pressed for the hiring of his daughter-in-law.

The next summer, though he had gone off to Harvard Law School (another impressive accomplishment he prefers not to discuss), Obama returned to the Windy City to work as an intern at Sidley. Dohrn was gone by then to teach at Northwestern. A coincidence? Maybe (Diamond doesn’t think so), but that’s an awful lot of coincidences — and a long trail of common people, places and experiences — for people who purportedly didn’t know each other yet managed to end up as partners in significant financial and political ventures.

[Hacklehead]

Its amazing that they will hire domestic terrorists but then reject a speaking appearance by someone like Clarance Thomas because he is “too extreme”.

[Beckwith]

So did Barack Obama.

He was a summer intern there in 1989. That’s where he met Michelle, who was his advisor.

Dohrn was there too. Sponsored by one Tom Ayers, CEO of Chicago Electric and the father of Bill.

[Paratrooper]

Concur with your statement about Sidley Austin. Ayers father had connections to this law firm and surely is the reason Ayers wife was hired to work for the New York office. She was working while Ayers completed his education. Can someone show that Ayers wife also worked for Sidley Austin in Chicago? I believe there is some connection with Obama and Ayers in New York, just don’t know what it is. I believe this relationship is the reason Obama moved to Chicago in 1985.

[Paratrooper]

Dohrn worked for Sidley Austin in NYC, can you verify she also worked for firm in Chicago?

[Beckwith]

I'm glad you asked. I noticed that the Michelle/Dohrn entry in The Obama File had no link.

Here is a good account:

While at Sidley & Austin (1989-1991), Michelle would meet the terrorist, Bernadine Dohrn, who helped bomb something like 25 targets, including the Capitol and the Pentagon.

Dohrn was working at the firm as a result of the recommendation of the CEO of Chicago's power company, Tom Ayers.  His son, the unrepentant terrorist, Bill Ayers, ran the organization that put up the money to bring Obama to Chicago in the first place.

Ayers' father, Thomas Ayers, was CEO of Commonwealth Edison as well as a trustee of Tribune Co. and chairman of the board of Northwestern University.

Dohrn was hired by . . ."the powerhouse firm of Sidley Austin." The very same law firm where Barack Obama was hired as a summer associate after his first year at Harvard Law School.  Where he met Michelle, his future wife.  And just how did that coincidence happen?

Trienens headed Sidley Austin when the firm hired Dohrn in 1984.  She had never practiced law and had been out of law school for 17 years.

When I asked Trienens if he had hired Dohrn, he replied: "Yes."

Wasn't that a bit of nepotism, considering his relationship to her father-in-law?  A lot of lawyers would love a first job with such a prestigious firm.

"We often hire friends," replied Trienens, 84.

Dohrn had not practiced law and been out of law school for 17 years while she was oh so busy doing, uh, other things,

Dohrn wasn't licensed to practice law.  Though she passed the bar exam, the ethics committee turned her down because of her rap sheet.  That limited the type of work she could do at Sidley Austin, which she left after a few years.

"Dohrn didn't get a license because she's stubborn," Trienens said. "She wouldn't say she's sorry."

The Obama File

[toomanygrasshoppers]

It does make one wonder about Sidley Austin, though, and about its clients. Why would a major law firm be employing someone who has confessed to carrying out bombings, and been convicted of aggravated battery and bail jumping? This is one of the largest corporate law firms in the US, and does work for a long list of respectable corporate clients. You would think some of their big revenue clients would raise a major stink about their employing attorneys with backgrounds like this.”

I find it interesting that Sidley & Austin was the firm in 2000 that was #1 in lawfirms that handled Fannie Mae real estate transactions. I haven’t been able to find out how they have rated in other years. Isn’t it amazing how all these folks and entities are tied together?

http://www.allbusiness.com/banking-finance/banking-lending-credit-services-mortgage/6084451-1.html

[missbehaved]

Didn’t Dohrn come back to Chicago in 87. When did Ayers finish at Columbia?

[muawiyah]

Just noticed that Tom Ayers was a trustee of Tribune Co. Hadn't know that before.

He, and his fellow board members, the owners, managers, executives, administrators, writers, editors and other employees were all, effectively, petty thieves.

For years they padded their ABC (audit bureau of circulation) figures to cheat the United States Postal Service and advertisers with higher than justified advertising rates (and circulation).

Terrorists don't fall far from that sort of corrupt tree. Wonder how many more of there are in the Tribune circle?

[muawiyah]

Sounds like you have a clue what these pukes were up to. Now for the burning torches and pitchforks (all of a legal nature of course).

[muawiyah]

So, we have a law firm with branches in different cities. Some employees are paid out of one office, others out of another office, and others somewhere else ~ maybe a client does the payment (for basic payroll).

None of that has anything to do with where any of the employees actually worked.

Since we are talking about the 1980s law firms, which are actually "partnerships", would get involved in this sort of thing to make sure no resident "partner" had more than 49 employees, 50 being the number of employees that would make your business or firm subjet to federal civil rights laws.

Some time in the early 1990s (1993 perhaps) the number was changed to 25 employees. I recall Allied Signal got in a lot of trouble at that time because so many of their little "wholly owned" shops they'd picked up over the years were so terribly mono-ethnic.

No doubt Obama was a "token" at that firm. The fact that Dohrn was paid out of the New York office didn't mean she wasn't on the scene in Chicago!

[GovernmentShrinker]

That’s not how partnerships work. A partnership is a single legal entity, and employees are employed by the partnership, not by individual partners. While these huge law firms certainly have some subsidiaries that are separate legal entities, especially for the offices in foreign countries, they never broke themselves up into a bunch of legally separate units that each had less than 49 employees. Small law firms may have done some of that, but for a firm listing dozens of partners on a single letterhead with the partnership name on top, and a single address, and the support staff for those listed partners numbering in the hundreds, no way was it feasible. Much easier and cheaper to hire some deadweights, both as associates and clerical staff, to fill up the EEOC quotas.

[muawiyah]

Look, if Allied Signal could do it, so could the law firms that helped them do it. There were even law suits over the issue ~ and I think they were still churning when Allied went out of business.

Lawyers write laws to aid their professional fellows evade the requirements that affect all the rest of us.

[GovernmentShrinker]

The very large law firms rely to a significant extent on their largeness to gain the confidence of clients who have a lot of money to lose if the firm screws up. When a large client signs up with a 1000 partner law firm to handle a high stakes transaction or litigation, the client requires the confidence that the entity they have legally engaged has very deep pockets that all owners of the entity have a big vested interest in protecting from liability. An investment bank hiring a law firm to structure a $5 billion securities offering, or a major audit firm hiring a law firm to defend it against a $10 billion lawsuit, is not going to hire a legal entity that has 49 employees and legal/financial firewalls between that entity and 50 other entities that are all marketing themselves under an umbrella name. It is going to hire a legal entity that has very deep pockets AND a large and expensive malpractice insurance policy (large enough that an affiliated group of 49 employee law firms couldn’t possibly afford to each have such a policy). Same applies to large accounting firms — with most of the original Big Eight having met their demise precisely because they were each organized with a single primary legal entity, and when one division got hit with a multi-billion dollar liability judgement, the whole firm was liable and went under.