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Top Democrat's wife may have gained 'illegal private benefit' from his committee activities washex.am/2QaxknN
A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from special interest groups and corporations that had business before her husband’s committee and could have been used illegally, according to an IRS complaint filed by an ethics watchdog group.
Cummings, 68, a Maryland Democrat, is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. His wife, Maya Rockeymoore, 48, is the chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party and briefly ran in the state's gubernatorial race last year.
The couple married in 2008. Cummings was once heavily in debt — in part due to hefty child support payments to his first wife and two other women he had children with — but his financial situation has improved considerably over the past decade.
Rockeymoore runs two entities, a nonprofit called the Center for Global Policy Solutions and a for-profit consulting firm called Global Policy Solutions, LLC, whose operations appear to have overlapped, according to the IRS complaint filed by the National Legal and Policy Center
Global Policy Solutions received more than $6.2 million in grants between 2013 and 2016,. Several of the nonprofit group’s financial backers, which included Google, J.P Morgan and Prudential, have business interests before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Cummings has served as Democratic chairman of the committee since January and previously served as ranking member.
The largest contributor to the nonprofit was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is the charitable arm of pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, a company that is regulated by Cummings’s committee.
The foundation gave $5.5 million to Rockeymoore’s consulting firm and $5.2 million to her nonprofit, but ceased supporting her groups in 2017. In recent months, Cummings has been a vocal opponent of Johnson & Johnson, targeting the company as part of the House Oversight Committee
House Committee on Oversight and Gov't Reform has wide authority to regulate business industries, including pharmaceuticals, banking, mortgage brokers, and technology. In recent years, Prudential, JP Morgan, and Johnson & Johnson have had business interests before the committee.
Since marrying Rockeymoore 11 years ago, Cummings’ financial outlook has improved considerably, according to financial disclosure reports and property records.
The couple currently owns two rental properties in Baltimore worth between $250,000 and $500,000 each, and last year they sold their three-bedroom Victorian row house in northwest Washington, D.C. for $896,000.
Cummings disclosed in his financial reports that his wife earns an unspecified salary from Global Policy Solutions LLC; he did not disclose that she receives a salary from her nonprofit, which was $152,000 in 2016, according to the group’s tax records from that year.
