Black Lives Matter filings reveal prominent Democratic lawyer Marc Elias and another longtime ally of former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have taken on key roles in the charity amid
scrutiny over its leadership and finances.
(Article republished from
WashingtonExaminer.com)
Elias,
best known for his
funding of British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited anti-Trump dossier while he served as Clinton’s 2016 campaign general counsel, appears to be representing the
Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation through his recently formed Elias Law Group. BLM’s national organization repeatedly lists the
Elias firm as one of its addresses and states in its short-year 2020 Form 990 that its books were now in the care of the Elias Law Group.
Additionally, Minyon Moore, a longtime top ally of both
Bill and Hillary Clinton, is now listed as part of BLM’s board of directors in the charity's filings.
It's not clear when BLM's relationships with Elias Law Group and Moore began.
Black Lives Matter filed a charitable organization registration statement earlier this month with the New Mexico attorney general’s office, listing addresses for BLM in Arizona and Oakland, California, but says BLM’s “other address” is “c/o [courtesy of] Elias Law Group” in Washington, D.C.
BLM also filed an annual registration renewal fee report with the California attorney general this month, with the filing saying multiple times that one of its addresses was “c/o Elias Law Group.” The filing also states BLM’s “books are in the care of … the organization” that is “located at … c/o Elias Law Group.”
“The latest filing’s addition of partisan lawyer Marc Elias confirms the group is more political than charitable,” Scott Walter, the president of the Capital Research Center, a conservative investigative nonprofit group, told the
Washington Examiner. “But it also suggests that finally some left-wing heavyweights have begun to deal with the embarrassing mess made by a major activist group the institutional Left has failed to, pardon the term, police.”
The national
Black Lives Matter group pulled off an
accounting maneuver that allowed it to delay reporting what it did with its $60 million bankroll from 2020. Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the charity that serves as the face of the national BLM movement, quietly changed its 12-month accounting cycle to run July through June, giving it until mid-May to report what it did with the millions that flooded into its coffers beginning in the second half of 2020.
The new BLM filing with New Mexico also said that Minyon Moore is a “Board Member” for BLM, and BLM’s California filing lists her as a “Board Member” too.
Hillary Clinton’s Onward Together PAC was
reportedly incorporated by Elias in April 2017, and Elias is
listed as a “Governor” for the Clinton PAC in a business filing for the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. Moore was listed as the “Director/President” at Onward Together for the fiscal years of
2017,
2018, and
2019.
Clinton
posted on
Facebook in May 2020 that Onward Together would “partner with” Elias’s Democracy Docket to “protect Americans’ right to vote by mail.” And she
posted in June 2020 that her followers should “join Onward Together and Marc Elias in the fight for voting rights by signing up for Democracy Docket.”
Elias
wrote on the fifth anniversary of Clinton’s loss to
Donald Trump that “I am still with her.”
Elias was
punished by a federal appeals court panel in March for a deceptive, duplicative Texas court filing, and the judges
shot down his effort to wriggle out of the sanctions in January.
He benefited from
“dark money” for years with his Democracy Docket Legal Fund, a “fiscally sponsored project” of the Hopewell Fund, whose board
hired a left-wing dark money firm (Arabella Advisors) to manage its fiscal sponsorships.
While at Perkins Coie, Elias
represented Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and the DNC in 2020 and was the
general counsel for now-Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid. He also represented the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and multiple other PACs.
Elias has
testified before a grand jury set up by special counsel John Durham.
Moore is
listed as a top leader at the Dewey Square Group consulting firm. She has a long history in Clintonworld, including serving as an assistant to President Bill Clinton and as the director of White House political affairs, where she advised both Bill and Hillary Clinton. She went on to work as the CEO of the Democratic National Committee.
The book
Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign lays out the key role Moore played in Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, including serving on the “Super Six” “executive council” with Jake Sullivan, Huma Abedin, John Podesta, Robby Mook, and Jennifer Palmieri.
Moore is described as a “close Hillary confidante” in the book, which notes that she helped Clinton plot her 2016 run “from the start” and that Clinton made her a “power” player within the campaign. The book also says that both Moore and Elias “set up shop” at the campaign’s Midtown office.
“There seems to be very little daylight between the Democratic Party and Black Lives Matter,” Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative legal foundation, told the
Washington Examiner, adding, “An avowedly Marxist organization is now being represented by the most prominent Democratic Party lawyer in the country. … Does that say more about BLM or more about the party operatives that are now seemingly running the show there?”
The co-founders of Black Lives Matter were
self-described Marxists. BLM co-founder
Patrisse Cullors announced in May she was resigning from the organization amid the scrutiny over her personal real estate purchases, but BLM’s new filing with New Mexico identifies Cullors as an “Executive Director” for BLM. Cullors has
said she and a co-founder are “trained Marxists,” and her
memoir included a foreword written by Communist Party USA vice presidential candidate Angela Davis and an opening epigraph from Assata Shakur, who was convicted of murder in the death of a police officer in New Jersey.
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