The husband of Rep. Cori Bush (D., Mo.) reaped a $15,000 payday from her campaign during the second quarter of 2024, according to a campaign finance filing Monday.
Bush’s campaign continued to enrich her husband, Cortney Merritts, amid an ongoing Department of Justice investigation into her private security spending. Bush, one of Congress’s most adamant proponents of defunding the police, has doled out more than $812,000 on private security services since 2019, of which more than $150,000 has been paid to her husband in regular $5,000 per month increments.
Those payments came under increased scrutiny after news surfaced that Bush and Merritts had secretly married in February 2023. Before that date, Bush classified her campaign payments to Merritts as "security services" fees. After the pair tied the knot, however, she classified the payments as "wage expenses," Federal Election Commission records show.
The gravy train may soon end for Bush and Merritts. A poll released Sunday showed the "Squad" member trailing her Democratic primary opponent, St. Louis prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell, by 23 percentage points just weeks ahead of Missouri’s Aug. 6 primary.
One of Bush’s most notorious private security guards is anti-Semitic spiritual guru Nathaniel Davis III, a man who says Jews rule the world and claims the power to read minds, summon tornadoes at will, and make fire appear out of nothing. Davis, who has received $152,000 in private security fees from Bush’s campaign, had several lifetimes to hone his abilities—he once claimed to be 109 trillion years old, born in a galaxy far away.
In July 2020, Davis offered courses on "psychic self-defense," where he taught his followers how to protect themselves from "telepathic and telekinetic attacks."
Bush’s campaign, however, hasn’t retained Davis’s services since June 2023 following a Washington Free Beacon report on the guru’s supernatural abilities, potentially leaving her exposed to threats from the unseen realm.
Fortunately, Bush isn’t entirely defenseless from the hazards of the spirit world, for she, too, claims a host of supernatural abilities. Bush described one of her powers during a 2022 interview with a credulous PBS reporter, claiming she once healed a homeless person’s cancer with her touch.
"And this [homeless] lady came to us, and she had these tumors, and she wanted us to, like, feel them," Bush told PBS’s Margaret Hoover. "I just remember I put my hand on her. My hand just began to move. And the lumps that were there were no longer there. She was so happy, and she went on about her day."
Bush added: "I never saw her again."
Bush said in January, after the Department of Justice launched an investigation into her campaign’s private security budget, that her decision to invest so much into her private security detail is justified due to the "relentless threats to my physical safety and life."
"As a rank-and-file member of Congress, I am not entitled to personal protection by the House, and instead have used campaign funds as permissible to retain security services," Bush said in January. "I have not used any federal tax dollars for personal security services. Any reporting that I have used federal funds for personal security is simply false."