“Sixty million dollars is not chump change,” charity expert Doug White told the Washington Examiner in a Jan. 27 expose on the status of the Black Lives Matters Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) and its massive $60 million USD coffers.
“What BLM does is of tremendous social importance,” White continued. “That they won’t give an honest or complete or straightforward answer in regards to its leadership is a concern. Not only do they not have an executive director right now, we think, but they also don’t want to tell you how the organization is being run.”
The expert’s comments were given in reference to the Examiner’s investigative journalist, Andrew Kerr’s, findings that, “No one appears to have been in charge at Black Lives Matter for months. The address it lists on tax forms is wrong, and the charity’s two board members won’t say who controls its $60 million bankroll.”
The article claims that former Executive Director, Patrisse Cullors, a self-admitted Marxist-trained revolutionary, resigned from the organization in May after an investigation by the New York Post the month prior made public Cullors’s multi-million dollar mansion portfolio
At the time Cullors stated that Makani Themba and Monifa Bandele would take the reins as senior executives. However, in September, Themba issued a public statement on behalf of herself and Bandele on Twitter that the pair “were tapped to play the role of Senior Co-Executives,” and that because they “were not able to come to an agreement with the acting Leadership Council about our scope of work and authority” that they were declining the position.
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According to the Examiner, neither Themba nor Bandele would say who has taken leadership at BLMGNF or who sits upon the Leadership Council when contacted for comment.
Themba told Kerr, “We never actually started in the position, so we never received any detailed information.”
In obtaining a copy of the Foundation’s Bylaws, the Examiner discovered that its internal regulations explicitly state that the Executive Director “shall have charge of all funds and securities of the Corporation,” calling into question whether Bandele or Themba would have had any authority to utilize the organization’s resources.
In February of 2021, the Associated Press reported that BLMGNF absorbed more than $90 million in funding in 2020 alone. The Examiner reported that “BLM spent most of the year essentially borrowing the charitable status of two other California-based charities, Thousand Currents and the Tides Foundation, which served as BLM’s fiscal sponsors.”
Kerr says that Thousand Currents directly transferred $66.5 million into BLMGNF accounts in October of 2020, according to recent financial statements. The transfer was formally accepted by Cullors in September, based on a copy of the agreement obtained by the Examiner.
Thousand Currents is notable, as its Chair as of June of 2020 was a convicted domestic far-left terrorist who helped Assata Shakur, a member of the Marxist revolutionary group Black Liberation Army convicted in 1977 for the murder of an FBI agent, escape from prison in 1979, according to a second, earlier report by the Examiner.
Shakur has since remained in hiding in communist-controlled Cuba.
According to the Examiner, despite the fact that the Global Network Foundation has a $4.3 million discrepancy between its public statements and its IRS filings attributed to “Professional Fees” and operating expenses, it nonetheless refuses to disclose its 2020 Form 990 tax return, which was due in November and is a matter of public record.
Executive Director for CharityWatch, Laurie Styron, told the outlet, “The amount of money involved here is not insignificant.”
“Irrespective of where any person falls on the political spectrum or what their position is on any social justice issue, hopefully, we can all agree that tax-subsidized public charities have an ethical responsibility to be transparent with the public about how they are operating and how the donations they receive are being used,” she stated.
Kerr remarked that a reporter from the Examiner attempted to retrieve BLMGNF’s Form 990 in person at its registered address, “only to be told by a security guard that there has never been a BLM office at the location.”
The outlet says it was contacted by “an unidentified BLM spokesperson” who stated “that the group does not currently maintain a ‘permanent office’ and offered to mail a copy of its 990 within two weeks.”
