Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), a member of the progressive “Squad” and an advocate for the “Defund the Police” movement, spent $70,000 on private security for herself and her team last quarter, according to a report from Fox News.
Bush has been a staunch advocate for defunding and “transforming” law enforcement, even going so far as to back a federal bill called the “People’s Response Act” that would place strict limits on cops, and establish a division in the Department of Health and Human Services “to perform and fund community-led responses to public safety,” per NBC News.
But while Bush has been pressing for Americans to lose access to public safety, she’s been funding her own private security.
“Missouri Rep. Cori Bush spent nearly $70,000 on private security over the past three months as she advocated for defunding the police, campaign filings show,” Fox News reported Friday. “Bush’s campaign sent $54,120.92 in payments between April 15 and June 28 for ‘security services’ to RS&T Security Consulting, a New York-based firm with a mysterious online presence, Federal Election Commission records released Thursday show. The Democrat’s campaign also paid $15,000 to Nathaniel Davis for ‘security services’ over the same time period.”
‘The $69,120 in security payments accounted for more than a third of Bush’s $197,000 in campaign expenditures during the second quarter, the FEC records show. It’s also nearly double what her campaign spent on private security during the first quarter of 2021,” the outlet said.
According to Fox, Bush has now spent nearly $100,000 on private security in 2021.
Bush has, though, consistently advocated for stripping Americans of public safety options. She heaped praise on the city of St. Louis, Missouri, back in April, when the city moved to strip millions from the St. Louis Police Department budget.
“Today’s decision to defund the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department is historic. It marks a new future for our city,” Bush said in a statement, the day St. Louis made their budget decision.
“For decades, our city funneled more and more money into our police department under the guise of public safety, while massively underinvesting in the resources that will truly keep our communities safe,” she added, largely blaming the police for crime in the city.
She later added, on social media, that “[o]ur communities wouldn’t have needed to spark a national movement to save Black lives if America weren’t racist AF.”
She also applauded an effort in Austin, Texas, to “defund” that city’s police department.
“Defunding the police isn’t radical, it’s real,” she said on Twitter.
She even led an attack against former President Barack Obama when Obama criticized the leftist “defund the police” movement, suggesting it could cost Democrats in the general election.
“With all due respect, Mr. President—let’s talk about losing people. We lost Michael Brown Jr. We lost Breonna Taylor. We’re losing our loved ones to police violence. It’s not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive. Defund the police,” Bush snapped at Obama.
Bush also led a federal effort to replace police, funding the bill that would “create a federal agency that would limit people’s encounters with law enforcement by funding community systems led by health officials, to respond to mental health emergencies, rather than police.”