Baltimore Gas & Electric says it never electronically transferred $9,281.94 to City Council President Nick Mosby on February 23, as was reported by his campaign finance committee.

Rather, the utility says its political arm wrote a much smaller ($450) check to Mosby on April 27.

This discrepancy is not the only oddity that The Brew found in Mosby’s campaign filings, which are now under scrutiny by the Maryland Board of Elections.

Two other PACs that Mosby said at first contributed $11,000 to to his campaign – then later changed to $2,000 – report no donations at all, a review of online reports filed with the state show.

Because PACs must report their expenditures to the elections board, a comparison can be made of their reports and those by Mosby, who is running for a second term as Council president in the May 14 Democratic primary.

In the case of BGE, the utility reported sending a $250 check to “Friends of Nick Mosby” on December 1, 2023. That amount was recorded six days later as a $1,000 contribution by Mosby’s campaign committee:

Home Depot PAC

In an April 9 pre-primary filing, Mosby claimed to be the recipient of a $10,000 check from The Home Depot Political Action Committee.

A week later, an amended report by Mosby lowered the contribution from $10,000 to $1,000. But there’s still a potential problem – the Home Depot PAC has not filed a disclosure report for 2024, indicating that it has made no contributions to Maryland candidates so far this year.

In 2023, the Home Depot PAC reported spending $11,750 on local politicians, such as Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson and Baltimore state Senator Antonio Hayes, but no donation went to Mosby.

The treasurer and principal officer of the PAC, based in Washington, have not responded to requests for comment. Nor have Mosby and his campaign manager, Matthew Cramer, returned emails and phone messages.

The Brew confirmed after publication that Home Depot disclosed the $1,000 contribution in a recent filing with the Federal Election Commission. No filing has yet been made to the Maryland Board of Elections.

Fire Fighters PAC

Mosby also claimed that he got $1,000 from the Baltimore Fire Fighters Local 734 PAC last October.

The entry in his campaign report not only botches the fire fighters’ street address and chapter number (it’s Local 734, not Local 7), but there is no record of the contribution in the Fire Fighters disclosure report to the elections board over the same time period.

In all, “Friends of Nick Mosby” reported more than $21,000 in contributions (including the $10,000 at first reported as coming from Home Depot) when, apparently, only $1,700 was actually transmitted.

On Tuesday, Allen Norfleet, director of the elections board’s campaign finance division, ordered Erika Dorsey, Mosby campaign treasurer, to submit “all receipts, disbursements and bank statements to support report filings” to the agency.

His request came after The Brew reported that the $9,282 contribution attributed to Baltimore Gas & Electric was over the individual donor limit of $6,000.

Norfleet called on the committee to return to BGE any money over the campaign limit and to fix a large number of erroneous addresses in his 2023 annual report filed in January.

No Expenses

Another peculiarity of the January annual report by Mosby is the absence of any expenses.

According to the filing, whose contents are affirmed as accurate “under the penalties of perjury,” Friends of Nick Mosby raised $169,000, but spent nothing on salaries, rent, field expenses, printed materials or at two major fundraisers held during the year (see below).

By contrast, the committee’s pre-primary 2024 report, covering 10 weeks, reported $61,000 in expenses, including $33,050 for robo calls.

• To reach a reporter: reuttermark@yahoo.com