RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Elijah Cummings , dead at 68

A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from special interest groups and corporations that had business before her husband’s committee and could have been used illegally, according to an IRS complaint filed by an ethics watchdog group.

Cummings, 68, a Maryland Democrat, is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. His wife, Maya Rockeymoore, 48, is the chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party and briefly ran in the state's gubernatorial race last year. The couple married in 2008. Cummings was once heavily in debt — in part due to hefty child support payments to his first wife and two other women he had children with — but his financial situation has improved considerably over the past decade.

Rockeymoore runs two entities, a nonprofit group called the Center for Global Policy Solutions and a for-profit consulting firm called Global Policy Solutions, LLC, whose operations appear to have overlapped, according to the IRS complaint filed by watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center on Monday. The complaint states that the arrangement may have been used to derive "illegal private benefit."

Global Policy Solutions received more than $6.2 million in grants between 2013 and 2016, according to tax records. Several of the nonprofit group’s financial backers — which included Google, J.P Morgan, and Prudential — have business interests before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Cummings has served as Democratic chairman of the committee since January and previously served as ranking member.

The largest contributor to the nonprofit organization was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a company that is regulated by Cummings’ committee. The foundation, which gave a total of $5.5 million to Rockeymoore’s consulting firm and $5.2 million to her nonprofit group, ceased supporting her groups in 2017.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was established by Johnson & Johnson founder Robert Wood Johnson but is not officially affiliated with the pharmaceutical company. The foundation owns 13 million shares of Johnson & Johnson stock worth over $1.7 billion, making it one of the company’s largest shareholders. Currently, five board members of the foundation are former senior executives at the pharmaceutical giant, including the foundation’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees Roger Fine, who previously served as corporate vice president and as general counsel of Johnson & Johnson.

In recent months, Cummings has been a vocal opponent of Johnson & Johnson, targeting the company as part of the House Oversight Committee’s probe of drug price inflation.

Under Cummings, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has wide authority to regulate business industries, including pharmaceuticals, banking, mortgage brokers, and technology. In recent years, Prudential, JP Morgan, and Johnson & Johnson have had business interests before the committee.

Tom Anderson, director of the National Legal and Policy Center’s Government Integrity Project, which has been investigating the nonprofit arrangement and provided research to the Washington Examiner, said the potential for corruption is “off the charts.” He said Rockeymoore declined to let his organization view her nonprofit organization’s most recent public financial records as required by the IRS.

“When a powerful chairman of a committee of the House of Representatives has a wife that is bringing in money from entities with interests before his Committee and she is not providing the transparency mandated by the IRS, there's a serious problem,” said Anderson. “The potential for corruption in this situation is simply off the charts and can't be understated. We hope Chairman Cummings works with his wife to end the stonewalling and provide the public with what's legally mandated all charities provide.”

Both Cummings and Rockeymoore refused to discuss the allegations with the Washington Examiner. Cummings did not answer questions about the overlap between companies with interests before his committee and donors to his wife’s foundation. Rockeymoore did not respond to request for comment.

The complaint asked the IRS to investigate the “shared leadership,” “integrated operations,” and “shared address and physical facilities” of her two companies. Rockeymoore’s nonprofit and the LLC have mutual clients, donors and projects, and were located at the same address and share a phone number.

According to its website, the Center for Global Policy Solutions is a nonprofit group that seeks to “create healthier communities, strengthen Social Security, and close racial wealth disparities." The for-profit consulting firm, Global Policy Solutions LLC, describes itself as “a social change strategy firm dedicated to making policy work for people and their environments.” The complaint states that they “appear to operate almost as a single entity, allowing for an illegal private benefit for Maya Rockeymoore Cummings and her husband."

Rockeymoore’s consulting firm was selected for a $1 million federal contract with the General Services Administration in 2017 for work on the “Leadership for Healthy Communities” project to combat childhood obesity, according to federal records. At the same time, Rockeymoore’s nonprofit group “served as the national program office for Leadership for Healthy Communities,” according to its website.

If both groups were involved in managing the project, “the arrangement is ‘self-dealing’ and cannot be ‘arms length’” as required by IRS law and “prompt the question of whether its organizers are getting fat off the grants,” according to the watchdog group’s complaint. Rockeymoore did not respond to multiple requests from the Washington Examiner for her nonprofit group’s most recent public financial records. Peter Flaherty, the chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, said she hung up the phone on him when he asked her for a copy.

When the Washington Examiner visited the listed business address for Rockeymoore’s consulting firm and nonprofit, a doorman said she had moved out of the office building over a year ago, did not leave a forwarding address, and the building has continued to get her companies’ mail. As committee chairman, Cummings, is embroiled in a legal battle to obtain President Trump’s tax returns.

Cummings recently subpoenaed Trump’s financial records, prompting the president to sue him in an effort to block the subpoena. Cummings struggled with serious financial problems after joining Congress over 20 years ago. His house was placed in foreclosure, at one point; he owed $30,000 in unpaid taxes to the IRS; and he was taken to court multiple times for thousands in unpaid debts. Cummings said his financial difficulties were due to his hefty child support payments.

Since marrying Rockeymoore 11 years ago, Cummings’ financial outlook has improved considerably, according to financial disclosure reports and property records. The couple currently owns two rental properties in Baltimore worth between $250,000 and $500,000 each, and last year, they sold their three-bedroom Victorian row house in northwest Washington, D.C. for $896,000.

Cummings disclosed in his financial reports that his wife earns an unspecified salary from Global Policy Solutions LLC; he did not disclose that she receives a salary from her nonprofit organization, which was $152,000 in 2016, according to the group’s tax records from that year.

Elijah Cummings was born on January 18, 1951 in Baltimore, Maryland. He earned a BA in political science from Howard University in 1973, and a JD from the Maryland University School of Law in 1976. From 1980-96, Cummings worked as a private-practice attorney and served in the Maryland State House of Delegates. On April 16, 1996, he won a special election for the U.S. House of Representatives seat that became vacant when Rep. Kweisi Mfume resigned from Maryland's 7th Congressional District in order to take a job as president of the NAACP. Cummings has held that seat ever since. He is a member of both the Congressional Black Caucus (which he once chaired) and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and was formerly a member of the Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus. To maximize the effectiveness of his re-election campaigns and political intiatives, Cummings has used the services of Robert Creamer's Strategic Consulting Group.

In January 2001 in Greenbelt, Maryland, Cummings spoke at the Working Families Legislative Conference, an event co-sponsored by Progressive Maryland and the Campaign for America's Future. This gathering focused on ways to link local Maryland issues with a national progressive agenda vis-a-vis such matters as living-wage laws and the public financing of “affordable housing,” health care, afterschool programs, and political campaigns. Another featured speaker at the conference was Robert Borosage.

When the House of Representatives voted by a 345-75 margin to defund the notoriously corrupt community organization ACORN in September 2009, Cummings was one of the 75—all Democrats—who voted to continue funding the group. For a list of other legislators who voted as Cummings did, click here.

On January 27, 2010, Cummings was one of 54 Members of Congress who signed a letter calling on President Barack Obama to apply diplomatic pressure to end Israel's blockade of Gaza—a blockade which had been imposed in 2007 to prevent the region's Hamas-led government from importing weaponry, particularly from Iran and Syria.

On July 28, 2010, Cummings joined Rep. Barbara Lee and former “green jobs czar” Van Jones in addressing that year's installment of the 21st Century Democrats' Youth Leadership Speaker Series, an event sponsored by Rep. John Lewis and Senator Tom Harkin.

In 2012, Cummings falsely stated that True The Vote, a Texas-based organization which supports Voter ID laws as a means of ensuring honest and valid political elections, “will do almost anything to stop people from voting”—i.e., that it tries to “intimidate” and “harass” minorities with “very confrontational” tactics, in hopes that they will “turn away” from their polling places. In a letter he sent directly to the group, Cummings charged that its “effort to challenge voter registrations by the thousands without any legitimate basis may be evidence of illegal voter suppression” and “could amount to a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights.” In a number of additional, lengthy letters to True The Vote, Cummings claimed that he was involved in a House Oversight Committee investigation of the group. But by law, that Committee is only permitted to investigate government agencies, not private citizens.

Testifying before Congress in February 2015, the founder of True The Vote, Catherine Engelbrecht, stated that after she had filed an application to have the IRS grant tax-exempt status to her organization, that agency—along with the FBI, ATF, and OSHA—began targeting and harassing her. This was part of a much larger scandal whereby the IRS delayed, obstructed, and rejected hundreds of such applications by conservative groups. Cummings's involvement in this scandal became apparent in 2014 when the House Oversight Committee released a number of emails proving that: (a) Cummings had communicated with the IRS multiple times during 2012-13, and (b) the IRS and Cummings’s staff had asked for nearly identical information from Engelbrecht about her organization's volunteer activities and training methods, indicating a coordinated and improper sharing of confidential taxpayer information. Prior to these revelations, Cummings had adamantly denied that he and his staff had made any inquiries to the IRS about True The Vote that may have led to additional scrutiny from the agency. Cummings's transgression was a crime that, if prosecuted, could be punishable by up to five years in prison.

Former Justice Department official J. Christian Adams characterized Cummings and his fellow accusers as “liars” who “should be ashamed of themselves” for “bearing false witness against [True The Vote's] law-abiding citizens who are doing no more than observing the [election] process.”

At a January 31, 2013 event in Baltimore, Cummings lauded the propagandistic CITGO-Venezuela Heating Oil Program through which, each winter, Hugo Chavez's communist Venezuelan government donated what Cummings described as “life-saving” heating oil “for so many [Americans] whose resources are already stretched thin in tough economic times.” At the same event, Venezuela’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs for North America praised the Chavez regime for once again demonstrating that its “commitment to the poor transcends all boundaries, ideological and geographical.”

Cummings served as the ranking Democrat on the select House committee that was empaneled in May 2014 to investigate the Islamic terrorist attacks that had killed four Americans at a U.S. diplomatic facility and a nearby CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. (For details of the Benghazi attacks, their causes, and their ramifications, click here.) In May 2015, Cummings denounced the entire investigation as a Republican-led “political charade” and “partisan attack” that sought only to harm the potential presidential candidacy of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton's willful and repeated failure to provide adequate security for the Benghazi facility—and her many subsequent lies about the nature and causes of the deadly events of 9/11/12—had drawn harsh criticism from Republicans.

In January 2015, Cummings objected strenuously when Republican House Speaker John Boehner—without first asking President Barack Obama for his approval—invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to Congress on March 3rd about the gravity of the growing Iranian nuclear threat and his “profound disagreement” with the deal that the Obama Administration was pursuing with Iran. Cummings was one of numerous Congressional Black Caucus members who, because of Netanyahu's act of “disrespect” against Obama, elected to boycott the speech.

In April 2015, when the city of Baltimore was under curfew following nights of riots and destruction in response to the recent death of a local black criminal named Freddie Gray while he was in police custody, Cummings declared that most of the protesters were peaceful, and that their battle against police racism and brutality made them “without a doubt the civil-rights voice of this generation.” “America needs to wake up, big time,” he added.

Cummings is an enthusiastic supporter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which he has described as an organization that “plays a vitally important role in Washington and around the country in its advocacy for civil liberties and its fight against bigotry and discrimination.”

For an overview of Cummings's voting record as a Member of Congress, click here.

For additional information on Elijah Cummings, click here.