By Post Editorial Board - February 6, 2022
The
organization has no official leader overseeing its $60 million war chest after
its co-founder resigned in May. Getty Images
“It appears that the house of cards may be falling,” says
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita of the Black Lives Matter Global Network
Foundation, the legal entity that snarfs up most cash donated to the BLM
movement. Indeed, “this happens eventually with nearly every scam, scheme or
illegal enterprise.”
It’s not just Indiana: The states of Connecticut, Maine,
Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina and Virginia have all revoked
BLMNGF’s charitable registration, while California and Washington are
threatening to hold the nonprofit’s officers
personally liable for its lack of financial transparency.
The outfit has
failed to file taxes for 2020, the year it raised tens of
millions after George Floyd’s death at police hands and the rioting and
protests that followed. It has no official leader overseeing its $60 million
war chest after its co-founder resigned in May.
And that co-founder, Patrisse Cullors-Khan, is tied
to several other fundraising organizations whose finances raise “potential red
flags,” New York magazine reports.
Meanwhile, she’s been on a personal real estate buying spree, while BLM funds
transferred to a Canadian nonprofit run by her spouse have gone for other
dubious purchases.
Vast giving by deep-pocketed donors linked to
Facebook, Twitter and Netflix — as well as by corporations rushing to show the
“right” political consciousness — may have funded rank peculation by those
entrusted with the funds.
In the end, Black Lives Matter is turning into an
oft-told tale: Big piles of cash wrapped in moral fervor invite corruption. And
the more the cause is deemed beyond questioning, the faster the scammers move
in.
_____________
Memphis BLM founder Pamela Moses sentenced to
6 years for illegally voting
By Jackie
Salo
– The New York Post - February 6, 2022
Pamela
Moses has been sentenced to prison for illegally registering to vote in
Tennessee. Joe Rondone / The Commercial Appeal
In 2015, Moses pleaded guilty to tampering with evidence
and forgery, both felonies, and to misdemeanor charges of perjury, stalking,
theft under $500, and escape.
She was placed on probation for seven years and deemed
ineligible to vote in Tennessee because of the tampering with evidence charge.
Moses has maintained that she was under the impression
that her voting rights had been restored when she went to vote in 2019.
“I did not falsify anything. All I did was try to get my
rights to vote back the way the people at the election commission told me and
the way the clerk did,” she said at the hearing.
Her attorney, Bede Anyanwu, said his client plans to
appeal the sentencing.
“She believes the sentencing was beyond the evidence that
was presented,” he told the Washington Post.
https://nypost.com/2022/02/06/memphis-blm-founder-pamela-moses-sentenced-for-illegally-voting/
_______________
Where Is the BLM $60 Million?
By Peter Flaherty | Real Clear Politics
After leaving his victims with shattered dreams and millions in collective
financial losses, the legendary con artist Charles Ponzi observed with casual
cruelty, “Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price.”
There is something of that same unrepentant sentiment in the selective silence of
previously voluble woke corporate boards and national media pundits. Their
unwillingness to demand accountability and transparency of Black Lives
Matter Global Network Foundation, a $90 million organization that publicly
promised social justice to its millions of small donors and corporate
benefactors – including Facebook, Google and Twitter – after George Floyd’s
death, makes them aiders and abettors to BLMGNF’s questionable leadership and
violations of law.
On January 5, Washington State Attorney General Robert Ferguson issued a
“Closure Notice” demanding that BLM “immediately cease” all fundraising
activities, because it had failed to file its annual financial disclosure
report for tax year 2020, due last November. California Attorney General Rob Bonta
followed suit a few weeks later and threatened to hold individual leaders
personally liable for late fees. Despite these clear directives, BLMGNF
continued fundraising until reports last week exposed their flagrant
violations.
According to those reports, the group’s charity registration is also out of
compliance in Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, North
Carolina and Virginia.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita says BLM’s refusal to answer basic
questions about its finances and operations raises serious, even fundamental,
questions about its mission, purpose and ultimate legitimacy.
“It appears that the house of cards may be falling, and this happens eventually
with nearly every scam, scheme, or illegal enterprise,” the Republican attorney
general told reporters. “I see patterns that scams kind of universally take: failure
to provide board members, failure to provide even executive directors, failure
to make your filings available. It all leads to suspicion.”
BLMGNF founder Patrisse Cullors, a self-avowed Marxist who once called
for the “end of Israel” during a 2015 Harvard panel discussion, resigned her
post as executive director of the BLM money machine last May, with over $60
million in its coffers, ostensibly to focus on her second book and a television
deal with Warner Bros.
But revelations about her personal finances, including the purchase of four
homes totaling more than $3 million, were more likely the reasons for her
sudden retreat from the spotlight. This news prompted criticism from local
black activists, such as one black mother whose son was killed by Los Angeles
police: “Black lives don’t matter. Your pockets matter,” she declared. “Y’all
come into our lives and act like y’all got our back and y’all want to say, ‘Black
Lives Matter.’ But after we bury our children, we don’t see B, L or M, but
y’all out here buying properties.”
Speaking of buying properties, we do know where at least some of the $60
million went. It was transferred to BLM Canada to buy a $6 million mansion
in Toronto, the former headquarters of Canada’s Communist Party. Looks like BLM
is returning to its roots.
There is, however, the potential for much bigger scandal. When Cullors resigned
last May, she turned over the leadership to two associates. But they later
issued a statement saying they never took charge since there was no agreement
reached on their duties. Such change in management requires approval by the
organization’s board of directors, not a unilateral decision by a resigning
executive director.
Who exactly is in charge? Who is on the board? Where are the minutes of
the board meetings? Where is a certified independent audit of its finances?
Sixty million dollars is a lot of money, and nobody can say what’s happened to
it. There is more transparency and accountability in the operation of a local
chapter of the Girl Scouts.
That is why the National Legal and Policy Center, an ethics watchdog group, has
filed formal complaints with the attorneys general of California and Washington
to do a full investigation of BLMGNF’s finances and impose criminal sanctions
if warranted.
Long ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wisely counseled about those who wear their
virtue on their sleeve. “The louder he talked of his honor,” Emerson observed
of a certain questionable guest to his home, “the faster we counted our
spoons.” The recent revelations of the lack of accountability regarding the
Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation are timely reminders that a little
more “spoon counting” by corporate sponsors and elite media is overdue.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/09/where_is_the_blm_60_million_147160.html
