The former lead prosecutor of the Weather Underground has expressed indignation over efforts to link Barack Obama to onetime radical William C. Ayers by the campaign of John McCain.
“I am amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers’s terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child,” William C. Ibershof wrote in a letter-to-the-editor published today in the New York Times.
As chief of the criminal division in the Eastern District of Michigan, Ibershof identified himself as the lead prosecutor of the Weathermen in the 1970s, when the radical group faced riot and conspiracy charges for a bombing campaign that targeted the Capitol, the Pentagon and other buildings.
“Because Senator Obama recently served on a board of a charitable organization with Mr. Ayers cannot possibly link the senator to acts perpetrated by Mr. Ayers so many years ago,” he wrote.
Ibershof also disputed that charges against Ayers and other members of the group had been dismissed because of “prosecutorial misconduct,” as a Times story stated last weekend. Rather, he said the charges were dropped because of illegal activities, including unauthorized wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by the late John N. Mitchell, attorney general at the time, and the late W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director.
Ayers and his wife, fellow-fugitive Bernardine Dohrn, turned themselves in to federal authorities in 1980, after charges against them had been dismissed.
Ibershof wrote that although he “dearly” wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, he was “pleased” to learn that Ayers, now a university professor and an education advocate, has become “a responsible citizen.”
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