Top Democrat
<https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/top-democrat-elijah-cummings-wi
fe-may-have-gained-illegal-private-benefit-from-his-committee-activities> s
Wife May Have Gained Illegal Private Benefit from His Committee Activities
Alana Goodman, Washington Examiner, May 27, 2019
A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from
special interest groups and corporations that had business before her
husbands 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 states
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 groups
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 Rockeymoores consulting
firm and $5.2 million to her nonprofit group, ceased supporting her groups
in 2017.
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 Centers 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 organizations 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,
theres a serious problem, said Anderson. {snip}
Rockeymoores 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, Rockeymoores 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 groups complaint. Rockeymoore did not
respond to multiple requests from the Washington Examiner for her nonprofit
groups 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
Rockeymoores 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.
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 groups tax records from that year.
EM -> { Trump for 2020 }
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