NYT: Aunt Zeituni Was Barack & Michelle's Nanny In 2001
04/23/2014
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A boring article in the NYT about how President Obama isn't in touch (and thus doesn't bear any responsibility) for all his ne'er-do-well Kenyan relatives who keep winding up in America at taxpayer expense suddenly takes a swerve in a previously unknown direction:
As president, Mr. Obama has kept his distance from, and even failed to acknowledge, members of this eclectic clan. In the time-honored tradition of eccentric presidential relatives, the assorted Obamas have faced deportation and drunken-driving charges, started Obama-branded foundations and written memoirs. 
But they also made for a powerful element of the president’s Kansas-meets-Kenya narrative as a candidate who could connect different worlds. ...

But I hadn't known this:

In 2000, Ms. Onyango moved to the United States on a valid visa, and in 2001, when Mr. Obama was an Illinois state senator, she helped take care of his newborn daughter, Sasha, and did household chores for the family in Chicago, according to Obama family members. But she stayed illegally after unsuccessfully seeking asylum. When reporters found her in Boston public housing during the 2008 election, Mr. Obama’s aides said he did not know she was in the United States illegally and returned her $265 in campaign contributions. 
In 2010, she received asylum and celebrated by telling an interviewer: “President Obama, I’m his aunt. If he does a wrong thing, I’m the only person on earth allowed to pinch his ears and smack him.”[Amid Politics, Obama Drifted Away From Kin, By Jason Horowitz, April 22, 2014]
Does this suggest that Barack and Michelle imported his Kenyan aunt to work illegally in the U.S. for them and then dumped her on the welfare system when she didn't work out? Did they pay her or was this one of those quasi-slave labor arrangements? How many laws were broken?
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