(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., threatened an attorney who filed a complaint against her congressional campaign’s payouts made to her husband.
David Mitriani, counsel for Cori Bush for Congress, sent a letter to Dan Backer, the lawyer who submitted the initial complaint to multiple governmet agencies, requesting that he retract the complaints, according to the Daily Caller.
In the letter, filed on behalf of the Committee to Defeat the President—a group dedicated to removing President Joe Biden from power—Mitriani claimed the allegations of the payouts were false and warned of possible legal retaliation.
“We demand that you retract the complaints you have filed that are demonstrably false,” the letter said. “Failure to do so—or continued repetition of these false statements with knowledge that they are false and without merit may result in liability for your client.”
The letter acknowledged that Cortney Merritts, Bush’s husband, had received more than $60,000 in payment for security services throughout the 2022 campaign cycle.
However, Mitriani insisted that they were “for bona fide services, directly related to work provided to the campaign” and that “Mr. Merritts has a long history working in the precise field where he has provided services.”
At the time, Merritts did not have the security licensure necessary to provide services in St. Louis, where Bush’s district is located, or in Washington D.C.
Bush for Congress paid Merritts for his services on five separate occasions from January to March 2023.
The Campaign to Defeat the President filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission after the campaign issued more suspicious deposits to Merritt’s account.
“She’s either falsifying FEC reports that her husband illegally provided security services he’s not licensed to provide, or he did illegally provide them and she violated the law prohibiting paying for illegal things,” the complaint said.
After receiving the threat from Bush’s lawyer, Baker wrote back suggesting that he and the CDP stood by their initial assertions as being factually sound and warning that Bush’s lawfare attack might only add to the evidentiary record.
“You have not identified any false statements of fact—as opposed to non-frivolous legal conclusions and non-actionable opinions based on disclosed facts— in any of CDP’s filings,” he said.
“Nor have you provided any actual evidence establishing any of CDP’s assertions were false,” he added. “To the contrary, several of the factual claims you make in the Threat Letter actually bolster CDP’s complaints.”
Baker, who previously worked with the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, is no stranger to watchdog advocacy when it comes to Democrats’ suspicious campaign-finance dealings.
He previously filed multiple FEC ethics complaints against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-N.Y., and deserves credit for having effected one of the sole measures of accoutability against the Hilllary Clinton campaign related to its corrupt Steele dossier hoax.
Bush’s efforts to use her husband as private security may be particularly offensive due to the double layer of duplicity involved, however.
While other Squad members, including Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., have attempted to pay their lovers questionably for campaign services rendered, Bush was one of Congress’s most outspoken “defund the police” advocates during and after the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots.
Thus, while she was more than happy to leave the citizens of her St. Louis district to fend for themselves amid a violent crime wave, she not only was benefiting from private security but was profiting off it.
Bush appears, in fact, to have been the biggest individual spender on private security for the year 2021, totaling an estimated $200,000 in one year alone, but shrugged it off when confronted.
Rep. @CoriBush on CBSN responding to critics who point out she spent roughly $70,000 on private security while calling to defund the police: https://t.co/GHcR9qFVxG pic.twitter.com/GhCLha7BNR
— Kathryn Watson (@kathrynw5) August 5, 2021
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
