On Monday, Stanley Kurtz wrote in the National Review that he had been denied access to a cache of files housed at the University of Illinois pertaining to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the nonprofit institution where Barack Obama worked with Bill Ayers. It’s been heating up the conservative media all week, but now the the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune are now on the case. The current operating excuse is that the donor of the records has not given the ownership rights of the records to the university, which says it is “aggressively pursuing” an agreement with the donor. Though the hometown Tribune columnist John Kass says one needs look no further than the the name of the library: The Richard J. Daley Library.

There are few things that rile up journalists more than being denied access to something. Now that some mainstream newspapers have picked up on it, I think they will keep pursuing this story, and like pent up steam, these documents will somehow find a way out. So, the only thing that sealing the documents is doing is generating a stream of stories about Obama’s relationship with a domestic terrorist. So if somebody is trying to protect Obama, he or she isn’t doing the candidate any favors.