Yet another terrorist tie to Obama White House

William Ayers

The director of the White House Fellows program, Cindy S. Moelis, previously served as director of a group that granted Weather Underground terrorist organization founder William Ayers its "public trust" award, WND has learned.

Moelis' group, the Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, also was one of the biggest recipients of a grant from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which was founded by Ayers and chaired by Barack Obama.

Earlier this week, WND reported Moelis' White House program appointed as one of its fellows Vartan Gregorian, a charity boss who served as a point man in granting $49.2 million in startup capital to Ayers' and Obama's Challenge.

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WND reported Gregorian was central in Ayers' recruitment of Obama to serve as the first chairman of the Challenge project – a job in which Obama worked closely on a regular basis with Ayers.

Obama later touted his job at the project as qualifying him to run for public office, as WND previously reported.

It has emerged that in November 2001, Moelis became the public-interest group's "new director of education initiatives."

Business and Professional People for the Public Interest describes itself as a "vigorous advocate of equitable public schools [that] has supported the movement for small and personalized learning communities since 1992." Besides education activism, the group also lobbies and litigates on public- and affordable-housing issues.

The group was one of the biggest recipients of grants from the Challenge, run by Obama and Ayers. Also, the group operated the Coalition of Schools for Better Education, a group which from 1998 through 2001 received $375,000 in grants from the Challenge.

In 1996, the group gave Ayers its Champion of the Public Interest award – an honor touted on Ayers' personal website.

Moelis and her husband, Robert S. Rivkin, became financial bundlers and donors for Obama's 2008 campaign as well as for the president's previous runs for public office. They personally contributed to every one of Obama's congressional campaigns since 1999, according to public records.

In 2008, Moelis and Rivkin were members of Obama's presidential finance committee as well as bundlers committed to raising more than $200,001 for Obama.

In May 2009, Rivkin was sworn in as the 21st general counsel of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Moelis, meanwhile, was appointed by Obama last April to head the president's fellowship commission.

A White House statement announcing Moelis' appointment fails to mention her work at the Challenge–funded Business and Professional People for the Public Interest.

White House scholar funded Ayers group

Soon after being appointed leader of Obama's fellow commission, Moelis awarded Gregorian with a presidential fellowship. Gregorian currently is president of Carnegie Corp. charitable foundation. Born in Tabriz, Iran, Gregorian served for eight years as president of the New York Public Library and was also president of Brown University.

In his role as Brown president, Gregorian served on the selection committee of the Annenberg Foundation, which funded Ayers' Chicago Annenberg Challenge with a $49.2 million, 2-to-1 matching challenge grant over five years. Ayers was one of five founding members of the Challenge who wrote to the Annenberg Foundation for the initial funding.

Steve Diamond, a political-science and law professor and a blogger who has posted on Obama, previously posted a letter from Nov. 18, 1994, in which Gregorian, serving as the point man on Annenberg's selection committee, asked Ayers to "compose the governing board" of the Challenge's collaborative project with "people who reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of Chicago."

Ayers and other founding Challenge members then recruited Obama to serve as the project chairman.

WND was first to expose that Obama and Ayers used the project grant money to fund organizations run by radicals tied to Ayers, including Mike Klonsky, a former top communist activist who was a senior leader in the Students for a Democratic Society group, a major leftist student organization in the 1960s from which the Weathermen terror group later splintered.

National Review Online writer Stanley Kurtz examined the project archives housed at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago, finding Obama and Ayers worked closely at the project.

The documents obtained by Kurtz showed Ayers served as an ex-officio member of the board that Obama chaired through the project's first year. Ayers also served on the board's governance committee with Obama and worked with him to craft project bylaws, according to the documents.

Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Obama. Ayers also spoke for the Chicago School Reform Collaborative before Obama's board, while Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the collaborative, the project documents reviewed by Kurtz show.

WND reported Obama and Ayers also served together on the board of the Woods Fund, a liberal Chicago nonprofit that granted money to far-left causes.

One of the groups funded by the Woods Fund was the Midwest Academy, an activist organization modeled after Marxist community organizer Saul Alinsky and described as teaching tactics of direct action, confrontation and intimidation.

WND recently reported Jackie Kendall, executive director of the Midwest Academy, was on the team that developed and delivered the first Camp Obama training for volunteers aiding Obama's campaign through the 2008 Iowa Caucuses.

Camp Obama was a two- to four-day intensive course run in conjunction with Obama's campaign aimed at training volunteers to become activists to help Obama win the presidential election.

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