House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings is pushing back against allegations leveled at his wife’s nonprofit that it violated its tax-exempt status due and what Fox News called a “potential conflict-of-interest with the work of his congressional panel.”
Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, called out the Internal Revenue Service for its complaint against his wife, Maya Rockeymoore-Cummings, who serves as the Chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, also happens to run a nonprofit group and a for-profit consulting firm.
According to Rep. Cummings, however, the claims made by the IRS are “baseless” and a partisan attack.
“These baseless claims come from a group funded by right-wing mega-donors known for their political hit jobs,” Cummings said in a statement to Fox News.
“I am confident that they will be exposed for what they really are – a fabricated distraction from the important work being done on behalf of Americans, such as lowering the skyrocketing prices of prescription drugs.”
The complaint was filed with the IRS by conservative watchdog group the National Legal Policy Center, and initially reported on by the Washington Examiner, which alleged that Rockeymoore Cummings’ nonprofit organization, Center for Global Policy Solutions, illegally melded into her for-profit firm, Global Policy Solutions, LLC, and may have been used for “illegal private benefit.”
“According to the Examiner’s report, Global Policy Solutions received over $6.2 million in grants between 2013 and 2016,” Fox News reported.
According to their report, Global Policy Solutions received over $6.2 million in grants between 2013 and 2016 from more than one nonprofit’s financial backer including Google, J.P. Morgan, and Prudential, several of which had business interests before the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Cummings, which could pose a conflict of interest.”
“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,” director of the National Legal and Policy Center’s Government Integrity Project, Tom Anderson, told the Examiner.
“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.”
Rockeymoore-Cummings, in a statement to The Washington Post last week, blasted the report and the complaint as a “hit piece.”
“It appears a conservative front group and a news outlet . . . are pushing a hit piece filled with faulty research, lies and innuendo in an attempt to tarnish my personal reputation, professional work and public service as well as that of my spouse,” Rockeymoore-Cummings said in a statement to The Post, calling the effort a “distasteful attempt to intimidate my family into silence at such a pivotal moment in our nation’s history.”
