Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) — a member of the progressive group of House lawmakers called “The Squad” — is under investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for allegedly misspending federal funds for personal security. Yesterday, the clerk of the House of Representatives reported on the floor that the House Sargeant at Arms had received a DOJ subpoena for records relating to expenditures made by a Member. It was later revealed that the Member in question was Bush.
While the exact details and scope of the DOJ investigation are unclear at this time, it is likely to focus on the Missouri Democrat’s prolific use of public funds for private security and whether that money was abused for other personal expenditures. Bush married one of her private security guards, Cortney Merritts, in February last year.
Elected in the 2020 election, Bush has used government funds allotted to Congressional offices to spend prodigiously on security services. In her first three months in office, she spent over $32,000 on security. Her publicly funded ‘private’ security was further supplemented with campaign funds as well.
During her 2022 re-election campaign, Bush paid her future husband, Merritts, $62,359 for security services — though this appears to have come from her campaign accounts and not public funds. All in all, Bush’s campaign spent over half a million dollars on private security during the 2022 campaign.
In Congress, Bush has been an outspoken supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), even dismissing the group‘s participation in violent riots across the country in 2020. Additionally, Bush’s outsized spending on private security has drawn criticism in light of her advocacy and support for slashing the budges of — and even abolishing — local police departments.
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