Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, widow of Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), lost the Democratic special election primary yesterday to serve the rest of his term. Former Rep. Kweisi Mfume easily won with more than 40% of the vote in a 24-candidate field.
Mfume will face Kimberly Klacik, who won the Republican primary, in an April special general election. Mfume is heavily favored in the Democratic district, although Klacik has achieved an unusually high profile by defending President Trump’s criticisms of the late Cummings.
Mrs. Cummings’ loss has no effect on an IRS Complaint filed by the National Legal and Policy Center on May 20, 2019 against her and a nonprofit she heads called the Center for Global Policy Solutions (CGPS).
The Complaint, and an amendment on June 7, 2019, alleges a score of Internal Revenue Code violations, including prohibited private benefit and inurement of Cummings and her late husband.
CGPS received millions in grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The funds were purportedly provided to fight childhood obesity. The Complaint asks the IRS to investigate whether “its organizers are getting fat off the grants.”
At the same time she heads CGPS, Mrs. Cummings also heads a for-profit consulting firm called Global Policy Solutions, LLC, whose operations appear to have been indistinguishable from those of CGPS. The two entities shared office space, telephones, etc., all of which are flagrant violations of the Internal Revenue Code.
Another of the cited violations is a failure to provide or disclose a copy of IRS Form 990 when requested. NLPC Chairman Peter Flaherty asked Cummings again for the document during an event announcing her candidacy in Baltimore on November 12, 2019. She falsely told Flaherty, “We’ve given it to everyone who has asked.”
On December 20, 2019, Washington Post reporter Steve Thompson dug even deeper on the nonprofit in a lengthy article titled, “Sloppy Accounting, Funding Debts: A Look at Maya Rockeymoore Cummings’s Charity.” According to the story, “Her explanations of some issues either shifted or were contradicted by others as The Washington Post researched this story.”