Obama Warns Stations Not to Air “Radical” Ad

Sen. Barack Obama is warning TV stations and asking the Justice Department to intervene in an attempt to block the airing of an ad by a non-profit group that links him to an unrepentant domestic terrorist.

The spot by the American Issues Project questions Obama’s ties to William Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground organization who boasted of a series of bomb attacks at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol four decades ago.

The Associated Press said Obama’s “going-for-the-jugular approach” was the kind of response many Democrats complained Sen. John Kerry lacked when he was confronted with the charges of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 presidential campaign.

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Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor, who called the ads false, despicable and outrageous, said supporters of the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate have inundated stations with 93,000 e-mails.

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Obama campaign lawyer Robert Bauer wrote to station managers, the AP said, warning: “Your station is committed to operating in the public interest, an objective that cannot be satisfied by accepting for compensation material of such malicious falsity.”

Bauer also wrote to Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Keeney, calling the ad a “knowing and willful attempt to evade the strictures of federal election law.”

American Issues Project counsel Cleta Mitchell responded today with the group’s own letter to Keeney

“Let me be very clear: AIP is not in violation of any federal statute, regulation or other applicable law,” Mitchell writes. “This organization, its officers and directors and all those associated with it have taken great pains to comply with all provisions of law applicable to AIP’s activities and programs and will continue to do so at all times in the future.”

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{snip} Obama launched his political career with an event in Ayers’ home, and WND first reported Obama served on the board of the Wood’s Fund, a liberal Chicago nonprofit, alongside Ayers from 1999 to 2002.

Obama also was chairman, under Ayers’ leadership, of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC, a school reform organization. The University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers is a professor, is scheduled to make available today records of Obama’s service on the CAC board.

Responding to the Obama campaign’s fierce reaction, American Issues Project spokesman Christian Pinkston said, “It seems they protest a bit too much.”

“They’re going all of these routes—threats, intimation—to thwart the First Amendment here because they don’t have an argument on merit.”

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Ayers has admitted to involvement in the bombings of U.S. governmental buildings in the 1970s.

“I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough,” he told the New York Times in an interview released Sept. 11, 2001

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Ayers is married to another notorious Weathermen terrorist, Bernadine Dohrn, who also has served on panels with Obama. Dohrn, once on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted List, was described by J. Edgar Hoover as the “most dangerous woman in America.” Ayers and Dohrn raised the son of Weathermen terrorist Kathy Boudin, who was serving a sentence for participating in a 1981 murder and robbery that left four people dead.

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