While hardly a day goes by when some far-left member of “The Squad” in Congress isn’t calling out a Republican for alleged violations of integrity and ethics, it seems they, too, have ethics problems.
Enter Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.)
As noted by Fox News, “Bush is facing even more pressure over her campaign payments to her husband for private security services.”
In January 2022, Budh enlisted Cortney Merritts, her current husband, as part of her campaign committee, and records indicate that it paid $90,000 to him since then. As of earlier this year, Merritts had no security license in either the St. Louis region or Washington, D.C., and appeared instead to own a moving company.
“The payments and Merritts’ lack of a license, which an official previously told Fox News Digital is needed to perform security functions in the St. Louis region, has led to a slew of complaints from watchdog groups such as the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) and the Committee to Defeat the President,” the outlet noted further.
“The Committee to Defeat the President is further ramping up the pressure. The group recently sent several supplements to previous complaints, as well as new complaints, to the likes of the Office of Congressional Ethics, the D.C. Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection, the Department of Justice and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department over Bush’s setup and Merrits’ failure to register as a security professional,” the report added.
Ted Harvey, chairman of the Committee to Defeat the President, told Fox News Digital: “It turns out members of ‘The Squad’ aren’t the progressive revolutionaries they claim to be; they’re just run-of-the-mill Beltway grifters.”
Harvey speculated that Bush was lining a family member’s pockets while “breaking local and federal laws in the process.”
“She either paid her ex-lover and now-husband to perform illegal work, or just paid him meretriciously,” he added. “But, either way, she broke the law and fumbled the cover-up. Americans deserve better, and our Committee is determined to hold her accountable in Washington, D.C., and back in Missouri, the same way any Republican would be held accountable by the radical Left.”
In response to the criticism of the arrangement, Bush’s campaign recently altered the wording of the payments. Starting from when Merritts was first listed on the payroll until early April of this year, the campaign designated the money as “security services.”
But, the campaign made a change in mid-April by adjusting the recorded expenditures from “security services” to “wage expenses,” while the payment amounts remained unchanged. The revised language persisted throughout the latest reporting period, as indicated by her filed documents.
