Black Lives Matter PAC siphoned away almost all of its cash reserves during the first three months of 2022, with the largest chunk of funds going to a firm owned by a BLM board member.
BLM PAC ended March with just $19,750 in the bank after raising $80,000 and spending $116,000 during the first quarter, according to a filing submitted to the Federal Election Commission on Friday. The group has burned through nearly 94% of its available cash reserves since the start of 2021, when it controlled a $305,000 war chest.
Bowers Consulting Firm, a company run by BLM board member Shalomyah Bowers, was the highest-paid BLM PAC vendor during the first quarter of 2022, having received $45,000 from the PAC for “strategic consulting services.”
Elias Law Group, the law firm run by Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, received $8,000 for legal services rendered to BLM PAC during the period, and the Perkins Coie law firm received $8,350 for compliance services.
“BLM PAC’s donors would be surprised to know their contributions are being paid to BLM insiders and consultants rather than electing their favorite candidates for the mid-term elections,” said Paul Kamenar, counsel to watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center.
BLM PAC is affiliated with the BLM Global Network Foundation, the national BLM group that has weathered months of escalating criticism for spending millions of its charitable dollars on mansions in Los Angeles and Canada while simultaneously stonewalling the release of its financial disclosures to the public.
The national BLM group voluntarily shut down its ability to raise charitable funds on Feb. 2 following a Washington Examiner investigation into its lack of financial transparency, which prompted multiple states to issue demands to the group to cease its fundraising activities.
The revelation that BLM PAC is also in dire financial straits comes after the group hit the scene with a splash in October 2020 and raised $1.05 million by the end of the year.
BLM PAC claimed to be a force to be reckoned with in a February 2021 report, saying the $746,000 it spent on the Georgia Senate races in 2020 played a pivotal role in securing victory for Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
When cash was flowing into BLM PAC’s coffers in 2020, the group paid $150,000 to an art firm run by the father of BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors’s only child to co-produce an election night livestream that industry experts said should have cost a fraction of the price to produce.
The national BLM group recently came under fire for using its charitable resources to help raise funds for BLM PAC in an email sent to the charity’s supporters in March. The PAC later told the Washington Examiner it refunded all contributions it received from the email campaign after the NLPC said the message could put BLM’s charitable status at risk.
The NLPC filed an IRS complaint against the national BLM group and Cullors on Thursday over the charity’s purchase of a $6 million Los Angeles mansion that was allegedly used for Cullors’s private benefit.
The watchdog said it was “highly unusual” that BLM purchased the mansion in cash through a middleman in October 2020, transferred the deed to an obscure LLC one week later, and then concealed the mansion’s existence from its donors for 19 months while Cullors stayed at the property for days at a time and used it in multiple videos posted to her private YouTube channel.
Cullors has accused the reporters shining a light on BLM’s real estate purchases and lack of financial transparency of perpetuating racist and sexist attacks against her and the BLM movement.
She said during an event at the Vashon Center for the Arts in early March that she gets triggered when she hears the term “IRS Form 990,” the document charities are required to file to the public every year disclosing their financial activities.
Cullors also said it was “unsafe” that charities are required to disclose their finances to the public.
“This doesn’t seem safe for us, this 990 structure — this nonprofit system structure,” Cullors said. “This is, like, deeply unsafe. This is being literally weaponized against us, against the people we work with.”
Reporting from The Washington Examiner.
