Bill Ayers’ recent appearance on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News program appears to be part of a systematic campaign to whitewash the activities of the communist terrorists who were murdering policemen and FBI agents during the 1960s and 70s, and to set the stage for their release and rehabilitation.
Kelly was unprepared for the interview and failed to consult prominent experts on the case, such as former FBI agent Max Noel.
“I’m extremely disappointed, as are a number of us who actually worked the WUO [Weather Underground Organization] case on a daily basis, in your attempt to ‘confront him’ without availing yourself of the knowledge that those of us who actually worked the case could have given you,” Noel said in a message to Kelly. The former FBI agent, who arrested the UNABOMBER and has co-authored a sensational new book about that case, was a member of the Weatherman Task Force in San Francisco, where Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were operating.
Noel has sensational details about how the Weather Underground constructed its bombs in order to kill people, not just damage property. This information, if publicized on “The Kelly File,” would have exposed Ayers as the crazed and committed communist he truly is. As a result of this glaring omission, Ayers succeeded in coming across as simply an aging “anti-war activist” or “radical” who carried things a little too far with bombings that caused some property damage but killed no one.
This is as big a lie as Ayers’ claim made to Kelly that he didn’t know Barack Obama very well, even though he helped him launch his political career in Chicago. “I knew him as well as he knew 10,000 other people,” Ayers said. “Today, I wish I knew him much better and I wish he’d listen to me.”
But the evidence indicates that President Obama, or at least his Attorney General Eric Holder, is listening.
Left unsaid on “The Kelly File” show was the critical fact that many of Ayers’ comrades are still in jail or prison, waiting for Democratic politicians such as President Obama and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to grant pardons or clemency. Some have already been released, with no significant press attention devoted to the pattern that is developing.
Ayers and Dohrn could themselves be charged in the Park Police Station case, in which Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell was killed. But apparently they are quite confident that this will never happen as long as President Obama and Eric Holder are running the Justice Department.
The insidious campaign of releasing and/or rehabilitating these terrorists has been underway for some time.
It began in 2003 when Kathy Boudin, one of Ayers’ more notorious associates, was granted parole from New York state prison. Boudin had gone to prison for her involvement in an October 20, 1981 armed terrorist assault that left Nyack, New York Police Sgt. Edward O’Grady, Patrolman Waverly Brown and Brinks guard Peter Paige dead.
Taking a cue from the rehabilitation of Ayers himself, who had become a “professor” of education at the University of Illinois, Boudin is now an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work.
Another Ayers associate, Marilyn Buck, was given early release from federal prison by Attorney General Holder, who was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration and involved in pardons for members of the Weather Underground at that time. Those released by President Clinton included Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg, as well as members of the Cuban-supported terrorist group, the FALN. The Obama/Holder Justice Department falsely claimed that Buck had repented for her terrorist ways and called her release medically justified.
The Justice Department intervened last year to release terrorist lawyer Lynne Stewart from a federal prison. She had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for violating the law against supporting terrorism. She had provided illegal support to her client, the “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Stewart was given a “compassionate release” because it was said that she was suffering from a life-threatening disease. Her “Justice for Lynne Stewart” web page is agitating for the release of more revolutionaries from behind bars.
One of Ayers’ associates released during the Clinton years, Weather Underground terrorist Linda Evans, recently spoke at a function hosted by the Cuban embassy in Washington, D.C., where she called on the assembled activists to urge Obama to release not only identified Cuban intelligence operatives in prison—members of the so-called “Cuban Five”—but also Puerto Rican terrorists like Oscar Lopez Rivera.
“We have some opportunities coming up for our federal prisoners, I believe, because of Obama and the fact that it’s going to be his second and last term,” she has said. “And we need to create campaigns and participate in existing campaigns that can really take advantage of that. Some of our political prisoners are in federal custody.”
This is the most open and honest admission of what they are doing on a national level.
One of those prisoners is convicted killer Leonard Peltier, who is serving two consecutive life sentences for the execution-style murders of FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams in 1975. Former FBI agent Max Noel told me that he is concerned that Peltier might get a pardon from Obama because of the pressure campaign mounted by Hollywood and the far left on his behalf.
A big push is also underway for clemency for Joanne Chesimard, a convicted cop-killer now living in Cuba under the protection of the Castro regime. A member of the Black Liberation Army, she had worked closely with Marilyn Buck and the Weather Underground.
Judith Clark, a member of the Weather Underground and its spin-off, the May 19 Communist Organization, has a dedicated group of supporters with important media connections, and they are working feverishly on her behalf. Clark was sentenced to three consecutive terms of 25-years-to-life, totaling 75 years in prison, for her role in the Brinks robbery and murders near Nyack, New York. The New York Times Magazine ran a story urging New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to release her from state prison. The “Friends of Judith Clark” have set up a web page and Facebook page in her honor, featuring the Times story.
David Gilbert of the Weather Underground is another cold-blooded killer and Ayers associate waiting for a pardon from either Cuomo or Obama. He also went to prison for his role in the Nyack assault. His book, No Surrender: Writings from an anti-imperialist political prisoner, includes an endorsement on the back cover from Ward Churchill, the disgraced college professor who achieved notoriety for comparing 9/11 victims to Nazis.
In another strange twist to this ongoing story of how Obama and Holder are perverting the legal system in order to benefit crooks and criminals, it has been disclosed that charges against Elizabeth Ann Duke, a fugitive from justice considered “armed and dangerous” by the FBI, have been dismissed. Duke is yet another associate of Bill Ayers, notorious for her involvement with the May 19th Communist Organization and charged in the bombing of the U.S. Capitol, among other crimes.
Legal activist Montgomery Blair Sibley has filed several motions in the case, attempting to determine the details of how the improper and illegal order of dismissal of the indictment of Elizabeth Ann Duke was arranged. He believes that the Obama administration got a judge to dismiss the charges in return for lenient treatment for the judge’s son in a federal drug case.
Donna Joan Borup is another fugitive anticipating leniency. In a radio broadcast about the case in 2013, the FBI noted that Borup, also considered armed and dangerous, became violent during a demonstration at JFK International Airport in Queens in September 1981 and tossed a caustic substance into the eyes of a Port Authority police officer who was on duty at the time. The officer was left partially blinded.
The FBI notes that “Borup was a member of the May 19th Communist Organization—a Marxist-Leninist group advocating the armed revolution and overthrow of the United States government.” This group served as a public support apparatus for the Weather Underground. Neither of them was an “anti-war” organization.
It’s likely that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn know the locations of Borup and other fugitives. But it’s just as likely that Ayers would not have divulged the information even if asked about it on “The Kelly File.”
One of the biggest flaws in “The Kelly File” show was the claim that the FBI botched the investigations and prosecutions of Ayers and Dohrn, when the evidence shows that the terrorists managed to avoid responsibility for most of their crimes because the Jimmy Carter Justice Department indicted and charged FBI officials with violating the civil rights of the terrorists and their associates. Recognizing the political prosecution of the FBI officials as a terrible miscarriage of justice, President Reagan would later pardon them.
The Obama/Holder Justice Department is picking up where Jimmy Carter left off. And now the terrorists who did go to jail—or who face jail time—are looking for pardons.
A pattern is clearly developing whereby associates of Ayers and Dohrn are getting sympathetic attention from the White House and the Justice Department as they seek to escape justice for their crimes. The campaign is paying off because the media refuse to pay attention to the motive behind the madness of such appearances of Bill Ayers on Fox News.
On Wednesday, I will be participating in a press conference in Washington, D.C. at the National Press Club to provide details about the effort to get the Obama administration to issue pardons for a series of so-called “political prisoners.”
In this context, the purpose of the Ayers appearance on Fox News was clearly to add impetus to this campaign, creating the impression that these “radicals” may have gone too far, but that it was long ago and the country should let bygones be bygones. One can easily envision an Obama pardon statement to that effect for Ayers’ comrades. Ayers himself may be angling for a Nixon-like pardon, giving him immunity from crimes that may have been committed.
Back in 2008, Obama had said, “This guy [Ayers] is not part of my inner circle, he doesn’t advise my campaign, he’s not going to advise me as president.” Obama also said about Ayers, “…I assumed that he had been rehabilitated,” a statement at odds with the fact that cold cases such as Park Station are still open and that a federal grand jury can be called to solve the crime.
Tragically, Megyn Kelly permitted Ayers to lie about the late Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant and Vietnam veteran who had testified about how the Weather Underground killed San Francisco Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell in 1970 in the Park Police Station case. Grathwohl, who testified under oath about Ayers’ admission that his wife Bernardine Dohrn had planted the bomb that killed McDonnell, had also documented the ties between the “domestic terrorists” in the Weather Underground and the Cuban intelligence service, the DGI. But Ayers, on the Kelly show, dismissed Grathwohl as a liar who had never infiltrated his group. In fact, the Weather Underground put out a “Wanted” poster on Grathwohl after they found out he was exposing their crimes to the FBI.
“What Bill Ayers said about my father was untrue,” his daughter, Lindsay Grathwohl, told me. “I was very disgusted.” She said that she was “never contacted” by Fox News about the show and that when she reached out to them, she “never received a response.”
It’s time for some serious-minded coverage of these terrorists, who are eager to go on television and present communist disinformation about what they did and who they are. The process of releasing and rehabilitating these terrorists must be exposed and stopped before Obama pulls a Clinton and lets more of these killers back on the streets.
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org