Cori Bush Campaign Threatens Attorney Who Filed Complaints About Payments To Her Husband

Cori Bush, one of the most radical voices in Congress and a hypocrite supreme has threatened a lawyer who spotted her illegal activity in hiring her husband and paying him huge sums to act as her personal security service which is paid from Bush’s campaign coffers. Her husband, Cortney Merritts, is not licensed to work as a security officer in either Missouri, where she lives, or Washington DC.

David Mitrani, counsel for Cori Bush for Congress, wrote a letter Friday to lawyer Dan Backer, demanding that they drop the ethics complaint against Bush or face charges of making false statements, but the lawyers did not offer up anything in the complaint that they are claiming is false.

Mitrani’s letter reads:

“We demand that you retract the complaints you have filed that are demonstrably false. 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.” 

“In addition, we believe that the continued assertion by you of these claims with absolutely no basis whatsoever in law or in fact that is not frivolous, could well constitute a violation of Rule 3.1 of the Rules of Professional Conduct of the District of Columbia Bar.” 

Backer’s client is the Committee to Defeat the President (CDP), a conservative activist group opposed to President Joe Biden. It is their assertion, based on the law that Merritts provided an illegal service as working as security requires licensing. Should Backer continue to represent them, they would move to have him face disciplinary action with the bar, or in other words, get his license to practice law revoked.

Bush’s campaign paid Merritts $60,000 for security services. They also made an additional seven payments of $2,500 dollars, once for security services and six times for “wage expenses” from April to June 2023.

From The Daily Caller

Bush’s Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings from the 2022 campaign cycle show that Cortney Merritts, her husband, was paid more than $60,000 for security services despite him lacking a security license in St. Louis, where her congressional district is located, or in Washington, D.C., according to Fox News. Bush for Congress’ paid Merritts for “security services” on five occasions from January to March 2023, FEC filings show.

Her campaign also paid her husband $2,500 once for “security services” and $2,500 six times for “wage expenses” from April to June 2023, her latest FEC filings indicate. CDP filed an FEC complaint in March, urging the commission to look into Bush’s payments to Merritts, and a supplementary FEC complaint in July arguing that by describing the more recent payments as “wage expenses,” Bush had “walked into a legal trap of her making.”

“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 reads.

Backer and CDP wrote a response letter to Mitrani on Tuesday, accusing the attorney of making unsupported allegations that do not refute CDP’s complaint.

“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. Nor have you provided any actual evidence establishing any of CDP’s assertions were false. To the contrary, several of the factual claims you make in the Threat Letter actually bolster CDP’s complaints,” Backer wrote in the letter.

CDP’s letter highlights the Bush campaign’s claims that Merritts has provided security protection to “high-ranking officials” and corporate clients, but supplies no evidence.