Democratic Missouri Rep. Cori Bush’s campaign has made several additional payments to her husband despite the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) ongoing investigation into previous payments she made to him, new campaign finance filings show.
Bush paid her husband, Cortney Merritts, $15,000 in wages between April 12 and June 30, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records. Bush in January confirmed that the DOJ had launched a criminal investigation into the hundreds of thousands of dollars her campaign has spent on security services since 2019, which includes payments her campaign made to Merritts, the New York Times reported.
Federal law bars members of Congress from paying family members to work for them in an official capacity but allows them to pay relatives for “bona fide services to the campaign” so long as the payments are not “in excess of fair market value,” according to NBC News. The Committee to Defeat the President, an organization opposing President Joe Biden, and the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), a nonpartisan watchdog group, both filed FEC complaints alleging that Bush’s payment violated federal law.
“It appears Rep. Bush’s campaign may have made payments for services that were unnecessary or above fair market value because of her personal relationship with the payee,” FACT wrote in its March FEC complaint. “If so, these payments would qualify as either impermissible payments to a family member or an impermissible gift.”
FACT also noted that Merritts did not have a license to perform the services the Bush campaign was paying him for and that it was retaining a security company for its services at the same time it was paying the congresswoman’s husband. The group requested that the FEC investigate whether Bush “converted campaign funds for personal use by paying a salary that was not for bona fide services at fair market value.”
Bush’s campaign has paid Merritts $72,850 since the DOJ’s investigation was made public, according to FEC records. Payments to Bush’s husband were labeled “security services,” “gas expense” and “wage expense” in campaign finance records.
The congresswoman has defended her security spending as “necessary” given the threats she claims to have received, Politico reported.
“In particular, the nature of these allegations have been around my husband’s role on the campaign,” Bush said in January, according to Politico. “In accordance with all applicable rules, I retained my husband as part of my security team to provide security services because he has had extensive experience in this area, and is able to provide the necessary services at or below a fair market rate.”
Bush’s campaign has also paid personal friend Nathaniel Davis III for security, who claims to have supernatural abilities like the power to summon tornadoes and says he’s over 109 trillion years old, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The Bush campaign has paid Davis over $150,000.
A July poll has Bush 23 points behind the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, Wesley Bell, in Missouri’s upcoming Democratic primary election. Pro-Israel groups are working to remove Bush from office over her pro-Palestine stance amid the war between Israel and Hamas.
Bush and her campaign did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
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