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--:-- Georgia Howe: In the aftermath of George Floyd's death in 2020, three words captivated the nation's attention. Black Lives Matter. It became a rallying cry for demonstrations around the world and became ubiquitous on social media. And the most high-profile nonprofit connected to the movement, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, capitalized on the backlash. But what happened to the tens of millions of dollars donated to the foundation?
--:-- Georgia Howe: For this episode of Morning Wire, we talk to Daily Wire reporter Ben Johnson, who's done a deep dive on the organization and its handling of the millions in donations. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Sunday, April 3rd, and this is your special edition of Morning Wire. This show is sponsored by Tessa Mays. Looking for a great way to bring amazing flavor to your meals? Tessa Mays is the number one organic salad dressing company in the country because they put quality and flavor above all else. Founded by three brothers with their mom's recipe, Tessa Mays has changed the standard for great tasting healthy dressings. Go to TessaMays.com. That's T-E-S-S-E-M-A-E-S.com and use promo code WIRE to check out all of their amazing products and join the Tessa Mays family today. Use promo code WIRE to get 20% off your purchase.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Amid the George Floyd protests and riots of 2020, many high-profile corporations, philanthropies, and celebrities pledged hefty donations to Black Lives Matter. In this special episode of Morning Wire, we're going to discuss BLM's financial controversies with Daily Wire reporter Ben Johnson.
--:-- Ben Johnson: Thanks for talking with us.
--:-- Georgia Howe: My pleasure. Now, there's been a lot of controversy swirling around this organization that received millions in donations for the Black Lives Matter cause. Before we dive in, can you give us an overview of this controversy?
--:-- Ben Johnson: Sure. The biggest issue is there are tens of millions of dollars in donations that are currently unaccounted for. From the very beginning, local chapters have complained that donations to a few people at the top of the organization don't filter down to the activists who do the real work on the streets.
--:-- Georgia Howe: BLM's finances came under scrutiny when one of its founders, a self-proclaimed Marxist, purchased multiple homes worth millions of dollars. The organization has failed to make mandatory financial disclosures, thwarted efforts to find out who's in charge, or even where its offices are located.
--:-- Ben Johnson: The latest controversy erupted when BLM Global Network Foundation tax documents showed that its new leadership includes figures in the inner circle of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Interesting. Now, Black Lives Matter as an organization formed long before the George Floyd protests, it had really fallen off the radar until 2020. Walk us through how it made this recent comeback, if you would.
--:-- Ben Johnson: Black Lives Matter has had the most miraculous resurrection since Jesus Christ. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation was formed in 2013 by three activists, Patrice Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, after a jury found that George Zimmerman acted in self-defense when he killed Trayvon Martin.
--:-- Georgia Howe: From the beginning, it made a big splash. Hip-hop stars Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, and Jay-Z held a concert in October 2015 that raised a million and a half dollars for the cause. But soon, BLM protesters associated the words Black Lives Matter with violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and with anti-police rhetoric.
--:-- Ben Johnson: In fact, by 2016, the number of cops ambushed in the line of duty hit a 10-year high. BLM became so associated with violence that the Washington Post published an op-ed titled Don't Criticize Black Lives Matter for Provoking Violence. Conservative journalists also began spreading the word about the BLM's extremism.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Cullors admitted in 2015. We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself are trained Marxists. We, and Alicia in particular, are trained organizers. Five years later she doubled down on that Am I a Marxist I a lot of things I do believe in Marxism
--:-- Ben Johnson: She was trained for 10 years at the Labor Community Strategy Center which was established by Eric Mann, a former member of the terrorist weather underground, to train people into Marxism, deep ideological Marxism.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Mike Gonzalez, an expert at the Heritage Foundation who wrote the book BLM, The Making of a New Marxist Revolution, told me that all three founders infused the organization with radicalism from the outset.
--:-- Ben Johnson: The Labor Community Strategy Center went out and recruited her at the age of 17. Eric Mann boasts about this in a book he published in 2012, well before the start of Black Lives Matter. The same thing with Alicia Garza. Alicia Garza also was trained and recruited by deep ideological Marxists.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well, Paul Tometi embraces the communist Marxist government of Venezuela. These are not people who hide these things. They're very open. The media doesn't cover Black Lives Matter. The media covers for them. And that's the reason I wrote BLM, the making of a new Marxist revolution.
--:-- Ben Johnson: One of BLM's three co-founders, Opal Tometi, confessed to the New Yorker, quote, when we started Black Lives Matter, it wasn't solely about police brutality and extrajudicial killing. That was a spark point to talk about housing and education and health care.
--:-- Georgia Howe: We've been calling for the defunding of police, a moratorium on rent, a moratorium on mortgages and utilities. Of course, many left-wing groups have used widely supported issues to form a popular front to promote extremist causes.
--:-- Ben Johnson: When Americans found out about its background, BLM's popularity waned. But things really changed for the organization with the death of George Floyd.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Exactly. That was a turning point. In May 2020, Officer Derek Chauvin violated police protocol by kneeling on Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes until he died.
--:-- Ben Johnson: The media marked it as an epic changing moment. It was presented as a racial reckoning. protesters around the world took to the streets in what the media infamously dubbed mostly peaceful protests.
--:-- Georgia Howe: During that summer, BLM again became associated with violence. Sergeant John Mattingly, an officer on the Louisville Metro Police Force at the time and author of The Daily Wire's new book, 12 Seconds in the Dark, remembered watching helplessly as the riots played out on TV.
--:-- Ben Johnson: These, quote, peaceful protests with seven people were shot the first night down in the protest in Louisville. Cars were burned. I remember the anxiety sitting there with the sweat rolling down my armpits, thinking, man, I should be out there with those guys.
--:-- Georgia Howe: You know, I felt like I had almost betrayed them because I wasn't allowed to be down there with my brothers. Sergeant Mattingly said BLM bailed out protesters who went on to re-victimize the city and each other.
--:-- Ben Johnson: One of the people that they had let out on bail that they had paid for shot another protester in the park and killed him. So the blood's on their hands, even though they won't take responsibility for it.
--:-- Georgia Howe: This time, the violence didn't seem to deter supporters. The money kept rolling in. Corporate titans such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi gave money to BLM charities.
--:-- Ben Johnson: But it wasn't only corporations. Millions of Americans who knew nothing of the group's Marxist roots also gave. What you have is individual Americans who are good-natured, who've had their feelings manipulated. And then you have corporations who, out of a need to virtue signal, send millions of dollars to the BLM organization, BLM Global Network Foundation.
--:-- Georgia Howe: billionaires like the son of Warren Buffett, like the Soros family, like the guy who owns Twitter, Jack Dorsey. The group's public approval rating more than doubled between 2016 and 2020. BLM essentially became the financial beneficiary of public outrage.
--:-- Ben Johnson: So the group saw a spike in support in 2020, but even then we saw some reports of internal issues. That's right. From the very beginning, tensions arose between local BLM chapters and the BLM Global Network Foundation.
--:-- Georgia Howe: BLM-GNF didn't have its own tax-exempt status, so it affiliated itself as a project of a left-wing non-profit called Thousand Currents That's an extreme left-wing organization Thousand Currents revealed that between 2017 and 2019, 83% of BLM-GNF's spending went to travel, salaries, and consultants' fees Only 6% got passed on to local chapters
--:-- Ben Johnson: As the checks came in, the allegations of financial impropriety kept piling up. By November 2020, some local chapter leaders reached a breaking point, and they went public with a statement saying, quote, For years there has been no acceptable process of either public or internal transparency about the unknown millions of dollars donated Most chapters have received little to no financial support since the launch in 2013
--:-- Georgia Howe: Some of the people who lost loved ones also spoke out against BLM Samira Rice whose son Tamir Rice was shot by police in 2014 accused BLM's leadership of profiting from her pain. They ain't taking care of the community. They got families that's homeless. Can't even bury their kids. But you living in good, you living in good, you living real good off our kids. Our baby's blood.
--:-- Ben Johnson: Lisa Simpson, whose son Richard Risher was killed by police in 2016, agreed BLM's financial focus set back the movement. We tired of them being up in the front messing up our fight because they have clearly messed this fight up and got people thinking that our fight is all about money, but it ain't about money.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Still, the money kept rolling in. Despite the massive cash haul, we have only a handful of documents to account for any of it. Okay, so not much transparency there. Not even the transparency required by law.
--:-- Ben Johnson: So what happened next? What happened after BLM's association with Thousand Currents? Well, in July 2020, BLM-GNF became a project of the Tides Foundation, another radical nonprofit, which has funded such groups as the Raqqa Society, which was involved in violent protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, as well as the National Lawyers Guild and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
--:-- Georgia Howe: BLM-GNF eventually got its own tax-exempt status. BLM-GNF's 2020 Impact Report said the group had received $90 million in donations. It said the group donated $21.7 million to other organizations, including 11 local BLM chapters, with several grants totaling six figures.
--:-- Ben Johnson: But most of the recipients were not part of the BLM. Some of the organizations that got BLM grants included the Black Trans Travel Fund, Black Trans Femmes in the Arts, and the Transgender Law Center's Black LGBTQIA Plus Migrant Project. It's not clear what those organizations have to do with opposing police brutality.
--:-- Georgia Howe: BLM also bragged about spending $2 million on a 2020 Get Out the Vote drive named after a Malcolm X quotation. They called it, quote, ballot or the bullet, which sounds distinctively menacing. The group said it spent $8.4 million on what it called operating expenses, and some of these proved really controversial.
--:-- Ben Johnson: Some expenditures went to consultants and vendors who were personally related to Colors or other BLM GNF employees. In July 2021, the group transferred millions of dollars to its Canadian chapter, which spent $6.3 million U.S. dollars to buy the former headquarters of the Communist Party of Canada to serve as, quote, a trans-feminist, queer-affirming space politically aligned with supporting black liberation.
--:-- Georgia Howe: It would also be the headquarters for BLM's Canadian chapter, which is led by a woman named Janiya Khan, who's the legally wedded wife of none other than Patrice Cullors. Now, Cullors has come up a lot here, and she's come under scrutiny over the last few years. Why all the focus on her?
--:-- Ben Johnson: Some of it's ideological and some of it's financial. Cullors, who is the public face of the organization, spent $3.2 million buying four homes, three in California and one in Georgia. She justified the purchases by saying, quote, home ownership has always been a way to disrupt white supremacy.
--:-- Georgia Howe: We should note that she's insisted she didn't use BLM funds for these purchases. But the move still brought unwanted scrutiny to the group's finances. Cullors stepped down in May 2021 and named two people to lead BLM in her place, Makani Temba and Monifa Bandele, but they were never seated.
--:-- Ben Johnson: Four months later, Temba explained, quote, we were not able to come to an agreement with the Acting Leadership Council about our scope of work and authority. As a result, we did not have the opportunity to serve in this capacity.
--:-- Georgia Howe: They told the media they had no idea who was in charge of BLM or its finances. Even accounting for all known expenditures, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation should have approximately $60 million in its bank account, and no one knows what they've done with it or who's in charge.
--:-- Ben Johnson: So they should have around $60 million, but it's unclear who's in charge of it, and even the organization's address is something of a mystery, right?
--:-- Georgia Howe: It is. That issue came to light in late January when a reporter from the Washington Examiner visited the address listed on BLM's tax documents. We tried to go to their Los Angeles address and was told by a security guard that Black Lives Matter has never had an office here.
--:-- Ben Johnson: And we constantly get packages for the Black Lives Matter that we have to return back to sender. BLMGNF two known board directors reportedly refused all media queries BLM had no public leader no clear address and no accountability for tens of millions of dollars
--:-- Georgia Howe: Scott Walter, the president of the Capital Research Center, which operates influencewatch.org, a sort of Wikipedia of left-wing groups, said he's never seen anything like this in the nonprofit world.
--:-- Ben Johnson: The 66 or more million that it was last known to possess is, you know, a very large amount of money for charities. That's more than the overwhelming majority of charities ever get to see. And to have that be a giant question mark of who controls it, where is it, whatever happened to it, is just amazing.
--:-- Georgia Howe: BLMGNF seemed to go out of its way to avoid transparency. The group changed the beginning of its fiscal year from January to July, which allowed it to avoid reporting on its $60 million windfall until this May 15th.
--:-- Ben Johnson: Critics called that an accounting trick to put off its day of reckoning. Morning Wire reached out to the foundation and colors for comment multiple times, but got no response.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Has the organization suffered any real repercussions over this?
--:-- Ben Johnson: There has been some backlash. Even Democratic states couldn't ignore improprieties this flagrant. BLM was briefly banned from fundraising in California.
--:-- Georgia Howe: In fact, the California Justice Department threatened to hold board members personally liable for the accounting breach.
--:-- Ben Johnson: The group was ruled out of compliance with legal reporting requirements in Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington State.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The Democratic fundraising organization Act Blue cut ties with BLM, and the scandals even boomeranged on some of BLM's corporate donors. Amazon booted Black Lives Matter off of the Amazon Smiles program, where every purchase on Amazon gives a few pennies on the dollar to the charity.
--:-- Ben Johnson: And that's particularly amusing because Amazon has itself given millions to Black Lives Matter. By the end of February, though, California gave BLM the green light to fundraise again.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So the consequences seem to be short-lived. So they're back in action in California, which brings us up to the last few months. What's the latest that's come to light?
--:-- Ben Johnson: Well, the latest comes from a tax document BLM released that contains politically explosive revelations. The foundation's books are being handled by the Elias Law Group. The Elias Law Group is run by a high-powered Democratic attorney named Mark Elias, the man who funded Christopher Steele's infamous Russian dossier.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The BLM also listed a new member of its board of directors named Minyon Moore. Both Elias and Moore have long ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
--:-- Ben Johnson: So pretty direct Democratic ties. Very much so. Scott Walter believes Elias took the helm because BLM's false cries of racism generates so much sympathy for left-wing causes that the group can't be allowed to fail.
--:-- Georgia Howe: If you're a Mark Elias, who's one of the most powerful persons on the left with ties throughout the political world, but also throughout the charitable world, you've got to be scared that these people are ruining that and making, you know, endangering the false claims of racism.
--:-- Ben Johnson: So you eventually have to step in and try to clean up this mess. And obviously, he's worked with the Clintons for years, so he's used to cleaning up messes.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now we're waiting for financial disclosures that the foundation is supposed to release by May, but they've missed deadlines in the past, so we'll have to see if anything comes to light.
--:-- Ben Johnson: Mike Gonzalez says whatever's happening with its books or its future, in just a few years, BLM has profoundly altered America's view of itself and policing policy across the country.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Despite the fact that there are many questions about what they have done with $60 million today, they continue to make our lives worse. Children are indoctrinated in the classroom because of Black Lives Matter. Adults are indoctrinated in the places of work because of Black Lives Matter. The homicide rate has increased because of Black Lives Matter.
--:-- Ben Johnson: You know, they may have changed the United States permanently. The next financial disclosures may tell us how potent BLM's activism will be in our future.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well, Vin, thanks for bringing us that deep dive on the finances of Black Lives Matter.
--:-- Ben Johnson: You're welcome. And if you'd like to learn more, I provide all the details, including links to original sources in my new piece for The Daily Wire titled, What Happened to Black Lives Matter's Money?
--:-- Georgia Howe: That was Daily Wire reporter Ben Johnson, and this has been a special edition of Morning Wire. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back tomorrow with the news you need to know.
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