Top Dem Cummings under fire, wife may have reaped ‘illegal private benefit’ from his gov’t committee role

grabs from https://youtu.be/jYP9J-7I02w and https://youtu.be/7CIbBnKr5Wk
Screen captures … Maya Rockeymoore and Rep. Elijah Cummings Credit: WJZ 13, CBS

Another prominent Democrat and his wife are being accused of big-time corruption.

Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. His wife of eleven years, Maya Rockeymoore runs a non-profit group and a for-profit group that appear to overlap, according to a complaint filed with the IRS by watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center on Monday. She is also chairman of the Maryland Democrat party.

“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 a breaking report from the Washington Examiner.

Is it coincidental that, according to the Examiner, “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,” after marrying Rockeymoore?

The two organizations run by Rockeymoore are the non-profit Center for Global Policy Solutions and a consulting firm called Global Policy Solutions, LLC, which is for-profit. The IRS complaint alleges the arrangement was likely used for “illegal private benefit.”

According to the Examiner …

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

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.

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

The Examiner was provided research and investigation results by the National Legal and Policy Center’s Government Integrity Project, which has been scrutinizing the nonprofit arrangement. Tom Anderson, director of the watchdog group, said Rockeymoore declined to let his organization view her nonprofit’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.

The paper reported: “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.”

It was also found that the consulting firm owned by Rockeymoore in 2017 won a $1-million contract with the General Services Administration for a project to fight childhood obesity, while her non-profit group served as the national program office for the project. The complaint charges such an “arrangement is ‘self-dealing’ and cannot be ‘arms length’ as required by IRS law and “prompt(s) the question of whether its organizers are getting fat off the grants.”

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