There is a secret group in the Obama-Biden campaign tasked with
shutting off any leaks from the record that links Barack Obama to his
longtime adviser and mentor Bill Ayers, professor of education at the
University of Illinois and unrepentant Weatherman terrorist and
fugitive from the 1970s.

This surprising fact has been developed by Chicago-born and Ralph
Nader-supporting Professor Steve Diamond of Santa Clara University Law
School, who maintains the Global Labor and Politics blog and has
pieced together over many months the unusual surreptitious activity
around the public records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC)
grant now housed at the University of Illinois and Brown University.

Since the spring, Diamond has led the investigation into the intimate
working relationship between Obama and Ayers that dates back at least
to the beginning of 1995 and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Grants.

Diamond believes this group is not harmless. "It's a 'Plumbers' unit.
You know, we are old enough to recall the Plumbers in Richard Nixon's
White House. This is like that. The job is to stop anyone trying to
use the (Chicago) Annenberg (Challenge) papers to figure out how Ayers
and Obama worked together on education."

The "Plumbers" were a Nixon administration fiasco, the so-called
secret White House Special Investigative Unit 24 tasked to stop the
leaks of classified material. Once revealed, the Plumbers unit led to
more bizarre discoveries that culminated in the Watergate impeachment
and resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.

Diamond believes this Obama-Biden "Plumbers" unit was responsible for
the harassment of Stanley Kurtz of National Review, who sought access
to public records of the now defunct CAC at the University of Illinois
Library in Chicago in mid-August. He also believes it may have played
a part in frustrating his own investigation of similar CAC records in
the papers of the nationwide Annenberg Challenge program that are
housed at Brown University. The question now is who among the major
figures in the Chicago progressive circle, as well as former Annenberg
Challenge officials, are unofficial members of Obama's Plumbers? And
who among other responsible officials of the University of Illinois
are their unwitting allies?

There is a substantial independent report from a major Democratic
source that confirms Diamond's suspicions. The source confirms the
unit is led by Bill Ayers himself and likely includes Tom Hayden and
other members of "Progressives for Obama." Most critically, the
Democratic source says this unit has direct access to media adviser
David Axelrod of the Obama-Biden campaign.

Obama has struggled since the primary contest with Mrs. Clinton last
spring to avoid answering candidly about his relationship with Ayers.
His motivation is entirely obvious, seeking to avoid the political
damage that would result from exposure of his friendship with a
strident radical who posed standing on an American flag to promote his
2001 autobiography "Fugitive Days" and who was quoted in the New York
Times on September 11, 2001 as saying, "There's a certain eloquence to
bombs."

In April 2008, Obama, speaking to George Stephanopoulos, described
Ayers -- as if from a great distance -- as "a guy who lived in my
neighborhood." Obama also mislead Stephanopoulos with the peculiar
characterization of Ayers as "a professor of English." In September,
Obama dropped the brittle pose of not knowing intimate details about
Ayers and told Bill O'Reilly, "I haven't seen the guy in a year and a
half," and, "I come to Chicago. He's working with Mayor Richard Daley,
not known to be a radical. So, he and I know each other as a
consequence of work he's doing on education. That is not an
endorsement of his views."

Obama went on to answer a question that O'Reilly actually did not ask
in the course of the conversation. Obama declared, "This guy is not
part of my campaign. He's not some adviser of mine."

The leaking that the "Plumbers" unit has blocked so far began last
spring when Diamond posted several literate articles on his Global
Labor and Politics blog on how Obama, an outsider to Chicago, had
risen so swiftly in the Cook County machine.

On June 18, Diamond posted "That Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood," in
which he discussed the CAC for the first time, using research he'd
done from the CAC papers on file at Brown University. Diamond was
puzzled when an additional request to Brown for more information was
met with silence; and he now wonders if this was an oversight or the
work of the "Plumbers."

Kurtz ran into the Plumber unit August 11 when he requested CAC
documents at the University of Illinois library in Chicago. Kurtz was
denied access, and there have been several inconsistent explanations
as to why. What is now believed more accurate is that the former
executive director of the CAC, Ken Rolling, who was a long-standing
associate of both Ayers and Obama, contacted the library officials to
stop Kurtz's inquiry.

There are inconsistent statements made by Rolling about the reason for
and timing of his intervention, and he told the Chicago Tribune that
he got involved because of surfing on the net from his home in
Mississippi, despite the fact that there was no mention of the CAC on
the net before August 11 -- except in Steve Diamond's blog.

What is clear is that by mid-August Rolling was in communication with
major University of Illinois officials, including B. Joseph White, the
university's president, Thomas Bearrows, the university's counsel, and
Tom Hardy, the university's executive director for university
relations. An August 23 Ken Rolling e-mail to Bearrows (obtained by
the Freedom of Information Act) points to telephone communications the
day before between all of the principals involved in the decision to
withhold the documents from Kurtz and others.

What is not answered at this time is when and why Rolling was in
regular contact with university officials, though the few facts
indicate Rolling began his interference -- and Diamond calls him "the
lead Plumber" -- at exactly the same time Kurtz made his request:
August 11. Did a university official give Rolling a heads-up?

Most significantly, the August 23 e-mail indicates a range of
materials that Rolling wants to review personally and to restrict in
the documents. "I can be at the UIC library between 9:00 am and 10:00
am on Monday August 25 to review the files." Much of the material
Rolling aimed to review relates to the first year of the CAC, 1995,
when Ayers and Obama were most active together in making decisions on
the large cash awards. Thanks to the FOIA, we know the response by
Bearrows to Rolling's request was suggestive -- "as promised, we will
carefully consider the concerns that you identify..."

Importantly, we do know that at least one of the awards in 1995, the
largest that year, went to a group led by Ayers and his partner and
fellow radical Mike Klonsky.

Who is Ken Rolling? He was a member of the Woods Foundation board that
was responsible for awarding the grant that first brought Barack Obama
to Chicago as a community organizer. Later, Ayers is said to have been
involved in choosing Rolling to be executive director of the CAC.

It seems more than coincidence that Obama, as a 33 year-old junior
lawyer at a modest Chicago law firm, was then brought onto the CAC
board as chairman, despite the prominence of other members that
included two university presidents. In a September 10 New York Times
article on Obama and education that mentions Ayers and depends upon
Rolling as an informant, one of the presidents, Stanley O. Ikenberry
of the University of Illinois, remembered about the choice of Obama as
chair, "It was unusual: here you had a person trained in the law
chairing a board on school reform."

The CAC documents were again opened to the public on August 26,
several days after the exchange of information between Rolling and
library officials. We await Stanley Kurtz's forthcoming articles to
explicate the details of the Ayers-Obama-Rolling CAC working
relationship. What is not clear is whether or not all the CAC
materials are yet available for the full discovery of the relationship
between the unrepentant radical Ayers and the guarded presidential
candidate Obama.

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