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.
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.
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.
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
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!