BLM activist Shaun King used $40,000 of donor funds to buy guard dog and then RETURNED IT
Controversial Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King reportedly used donor funds to purchase an AKC award-winning mastiff which he later returned as “it is too energetic to be a house pet”.
The activist’s political action committee, Grassroots Law, made a pair of payments to California-based Potrero Performance Dogs in the last year. The payments made by the committee included a $10,000 deposit on December 6, Federal Election Commission Records show. Fingers rose on King when he welcomed Marz, a Potrero-bred thoroughbred, to his family, days after Grassroots Law paid another $30,650 to Potrero.
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King made a Facebook post in which he welcomed a “new member of the King family” — a mastiff named “Marz,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. In the post, King said Marz would serve double-duty providing “alertness and protection” and as a family pet. However, the post is no longer publicly accessible. But soon after King made this post, another since-deleted post on Potrero’s Instagram page reportedly showed Marz back with the breeder noting that “he’s got a little too much energy to be a family dog so he came back.”
As per the report by Free Beacon, the $40,000-plus that King's PAC spent on Marz is equal to the contribution that the committee made to non-federal political candidates in 2021.
The BLM activist has not been formally accused of any wrongdoing in connection to Grassroots, which he founded with civil rights lawyer Lee Merritt. “This luxury dog expense may not be illegal for a PAC, but it shows little respect for King’s donors,” Scott Walter of the Capital Research Center think tank told the Free Beacon.
King, who rose to prominence with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, has come under fire after being accused of fraud on various occasions. He was accused by the mother of 12-year-old police shooting victim Tamir Rice of starting unauthorized fundraisers in her son's name; she also called him a “selfish self-centered person” in her Instagram post last year.
In 2019, King arranged for a “team of experts” to review the $34.5 million he’d raised since the Black Lives Matter movement began, according to a post on the Medium website. “In short, we find no evidence that Shaun has ever inappropriately accessed any funds that he has raised,” the Shaun King Financial Review Board wrote.
Two years back, King released a public audit in which he claimed that he received a monthly salary of $4,166 from Real Justice PAC and 'no compensation' at all from Grassroots predecessor Action PAC.
Later, that same year, his former ally DeRay Mckesson accused him of maintaining a 'uniform pattern' of fraud for many years. "King acted in ways that compromise others, compromise the collective work, and compromise a shared sense of integrity," McKesson alleged in an open letter.