The official Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization suspended online fundraising on Wednesday after being warned by the California Attorney General that it faced revocation of its charitable status after failing to file required annual reports.
The finances of the organization have been under close scrutiny since last year, when co-founder (and trained Marxist) Patrisse Khan-Cullors was reported to have bought four homes. She resigned, but concerns lingered about $60 million in donations that BLM collected by the end of 2020 but for which no one in particular at the organization seemed accountable.
California’s Attorney General, Rob Bonta, was one of the most radical members of the state legislature when he was appointed in 2021 to replace Xavier Becerra, who left to take up the post of Secretary for Health and Human Services. Therefore the fact that he is cracking down on BLM’s finances suggests the problems are of a deeply serious nature.
The Washington Examiner reported Wednesday:
Black Lives Matter shut down all of its online fundraising streams late Wednesday afternoon, just days after California threatened to hold the charity’s leaders personally liable over its lack of financial transparency.
The move comes less than a week after a Washington Examiner investigation found that BLM has had no known leader in charge of its $60 million bankroll since its co-founder resigned in May. California and Washington recently ordered BLM to cease all fundraising activities in their blue states due to the failure of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the legal entity that represents the national BLM movement, to report information about its finances in 2020, the year it raised tens of millions amid the racial protests and riots that followed George Floyd’s killing.
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Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita previously said BLM’s refusal to answer basic questions about its finances and operations fits a common and disturbing pattern.
“It appears that the house of cards may be falling, and this happens eventually with nearly every scam, scheme, or illegal enterprise,” Rokita, a Republican, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “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.”
The organization is also failing to comply with regulations in seven other states, the Examiner reported.
BLM and similar organizations enjoyed a fundraising bonanza in the wake of the George Floyd protests and riots, with many corporations using their donations to prove their progressive credentials and to fend off criticism from “woke” employees and social media.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new novel, Joubert Park, tells the story of a Jewish family in South Africa at the dawn of the apartheid era. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, recounts the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
