California's progressive attorney general, Rob Bonta, quietly reinstated privileged charitable status to Arc of Justice, the serially tax-delinquent "charity" used by Code Pink benefactress Medea Benjamin to dole out millions to far-left activist groups, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.
The charity's reinstatement came just 13 days after it first requested the action, which was estimated to take up to nine months, "despite a record showing years of delinquent filings, missing audits, a revoked state tax exemption, and unanswered questions" about more than $54 million in assets, according to a new investigation by the watchdog group Intelligent Action Network shared exclusively with the Free Beacon.
California's Franchise Tax Board first revoked Arc of Justice's tax-exempt status in April 2024, after the charity stopped filing and paying any required penalties, the Free Beacon exclusively reported earlier this year. This left a sizable cloud of mystery around the foundation's $54.6 million in total assets, which still remain unaccounted for. Benjamin's charity also did not file a federal tax return in fiscal years 2021, 2023, 2024, and 2025—and reinstatement on the state level requires a petition that includes complete copies of the IRS Form 990-PF for each delinquent year. But Bonta's Registry of Charities and Fundraisers pushed through Arc of Justice's reinstatement in less than two weeks "without demanding a full accounting of what happened to its money during the period when it was suspended and later revoked," IAN found.
Bonta's preferential treatment of Benjamin's charity is even more remarkable given that one day before his registry approved reinstatement, "the Franchise Tax Board certified that Arc of Justice was not in good standing and was not tax-exempt in California," according to documents provided by IAN to the Free Beacon. While the Franchise Tax Board had informed Arc of Justice "that its application for reinstatement would take about nine months to process," Bonta's registry "did not wait for that process." Rather, it "reinstated Arc of Justice, even though the Registry's own rules provide for automatic suspension when a charity's Franchise Tax Board exemption has been revoked."
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