Cori Bush Continues to Pay Husband with Campaign Funds Despite Federal Criminal Investigation, Filings Show

Representative Cori Bush (D., Mo.), a member of the far-left ‘Squad,’ has continued to employ her husband in an undefined role on her campaign despite an ongoing federal criminal investigation into allegations that she misused campaign funds, newly released filings show.

Federal Election Commission filings made public on Monday show that Bush’s congressional campaign has continued to pay Cortney Merritts a salary of $5,000 per month. Bush married Merritts in February 2023 while he was working for her campaign as a paid security guard. 

Merritts has been employed by Bush’s campaign since January 2022. While some previous Bush campaign filings have listed the purpose for Merritts’s salary as “security services,” the most recent reports simply list the purpose of the payments as “wage expense[s].” 

Bush’s decision to continue paying her husband as a campaign employee comes as the Department of Justice pursues a criminal investigation into her campaign expenditures on personal security services. While the DOJ has so far declined to comment on its investigation, Bush acknowledged the probe’s existence in a January statement while stating that she was “fully cooperating” with authorities. The same statement confirmed that House Ethics Committee and FEC investigations into her campaign spending were also underway.

“[R]ight-wing organizations have lodged baseless complaints against me, peddling notions that I have misused campaign funds to pay for personal security services. That is simply not true,” Bush wrote in January. “In accordance with all applicable rules, I retained my husband as part of my security team to provide security services because he has extensive experience in this area, and is able to provide the necessary services at or below a fair market rate.”

Since-deleted social media posts by Merritts depict him traveling with Bush since early 2021, the New York Post reported, indicating that Merritts’s relationship with the congresswoman began before she added him to her campaign’s payroll. 

Questioned by a Fox News videographer in October 2023, Merritts initially claimed he did not “have a role in the campaign” before admitting that he was “obviously” still “doing work with the campaign.”

While members of Congress are permitted to pay family members with campaign funds, ethics rules dictate that payments must be for “bona fide services” and must not exceed “fair market value” for such services.

Bush has long used campaign funds to pay for bodyguards and private security, despite her persistent and zealous support for ‘defund the police’ movements. An FEC complaint filed in 2023 by a watchdog group noted that in 2022, Bush’s campaign paid $571,856 for security, including $225,281 to a private firm called Peace Security, $50,000 to a man named Nathaniel Davis, and $62,359 to Merritts.

“I’m going to make sure I have security because I know I have had attempts on my life and I have too much work to do,” Bush told CBS News in August 2021. “So, suck it up, defunding the police has to happen. We need to defund the police and put that money into social safety nets because we’re trying to save lives.”

Bush is being challenged in her August 6 Democratic primary by St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell. A recent poll indicated that Bush is trailing Bell by double-digit margins.

A spokeswoman for Bush did not respond to an inquiry about her most recent campaign filings.