Squad loyalist and BLM congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri is facing a huge primary battle today. If Bush loses, she will be the second Squad member to be voted out in a primary election this year, after Jamaal Bowman’s defeat in June.

Cori Bush doesn’t have the same “fire alarm” baggage that Bowman did, but she has now racked up a slew of ethics charges and federal charges revolving around marrying her private security guard and paying him a LOT of campaign money. Audio was leaked just yesterday of Cori Bush admitting to using the campaign funds for security, and comparing herself to… wait for it… Martin Luther King, Jr.

The recording from Jan. 30 occurred hours after Bush walked out onto the steps of the U.S. Capitol and publicly acknowledged she was the target of several investigations.

Later that night, she urged her Congressional staffers to circle the wagons around her during a “history-making moment.”

“Do we run from it because it’s tough,” she asked, “because they throwing all of this stuff at us? Or do we push through and walk through it and come out on the other side victorious for the people who need us the most?”

Bush insisted her campaign’s payments to her husband were not illegal after the Office of Congressional Ethics dismissed one of the complaints against her. However, since she came under investigation, her campaign filings no longer list her husband’s payments under the “Security” category. Campaign finance documents show Bush began categorizing bi-weekly $2,500 payments to him as “wage expenses” after the investigations became public.

She offered several contradictory theories to try and explain why the Department of Justice opened an investigation at all after an earlier probe was conducted and dismissed.

“That did not stop the DOJ from picking it up too, because they had already received back in August or July, whenever that article came out,” she said in the staff meeting. “That person not only reached out to the House, they also reached out to the DOJ and all of these other groups. And so that’s where the DOJ one comes from.”

While she acknowledged the Justice Department complaint was filed in the summer of 2023, she also suggested she was coming under scrutiny for criticizing Israel’s military actions in Gaza — comments she wouldn’t make for another two months.

Then she compared the government’s investigation into her campaign spending to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI’s covert operations to spy on Communists and to discredit Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Just remember, think about how many folks was actually with Dr. King when Dr. King was doing all the things that he was doing,” she said. “How many folks turned away from him when the FBI came at him?”

“It’s the same type of tactics,” she said. “If we can throw mud on your name, if we can get you caught up in spending money, if we can get you in a place to where you tired, and, and people don’t trust you no more, and all of this… If I can ruin your credibility, then we can ruin you. And then you no longer will be in that seat and we can put who we want there.”

Bush’s efforts to keep her staff on board were ultimately unsuccessful.

She is now down to just one staffer on her legislative team, three communications aides, and her chief of staff. Two other aides help handle “operations.”

At the end of this month, Bush will no longer have any Legislative Director, Counsel, or Legislative Assistants on staff. According to her public website, Bush’s Congressional office isn’t actively hiring any replacements to fill the open jobs.

At the end of this EVENING, Bush may no longer have to worry about the holes in her staffing. This would be despite her besties on The Squad going to bat for her.

Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and Summer Lee (D-Pa.) are poised to stump for Bush (D-Mo.) in a virtual rally early Monday evening.

“We have just ONE DAY ahead of us before primary Election Day. Come join Cori & some very special guests on Election Day eve to rally together and get out the vote!” Bush posted on Instagram.

But Cori Bush played her biggest card when she dragged out Michael Brown’s father to go after her primary challenger, Wesley Bell. Remember, Bush got her start in politics through Black Lives Matter and the Ferguson protests. She is trying to use that to carry her through this primary election once again.

Bush is locked in a close primary race against St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, who defeated a seven-term incumbent in 2018. During his campaign for county prosecutor, Bell vowed to get justice for the Brown family.

In an ad released Friday announcing the endorsement, Brown’s family spoke about that promise. The ad opens with Mike Brown Sr. and his daughter standing side by side.

“After the murder of my son, Wesley Bell promised to pursue justice for my family,” the elder Brown says.

His daughter adds, “My brother deserved justice.”

Six years after Brown’s death, then-newly elected Bell declined to bring charges against Darren Wilson, the officer who shot the teenager.

At the time, Bell said that although the case represented “one of the most significant moments in St. Louis’s history,” an independent review could not prove that Wilson committed murder or manslaughter under Missouri law.

“He never brought charges against the killer,” Mike Brown Sr. says in the ad. “He never walked the streets of Ferguson with me. He failed to reform the office.”

Bush has spoken often of her time as an activist leader in Ferguson after the fatal shooting and has said it, and the aftermath, prompted her to run for office.

Two weeks from today is the 10th anniversary of Michael Brown's death.

His family deserves accountability for his killing. We fought for it. They were promised it. And that promise was broken.

His still grieving family deserves this platform to share their story. pic.twitter.com/6pOxXT58L7

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) July 26, 2024

This is where we also need to point out that Barack Obama’s own DOJ did not bring charges against Officer Darren Wilson, either – not that Cori Bush cares about THAT. She’s trying to win a primary election!

And yes, Cori Bush is a card-carrying Hamas Squad anti-Semite, as her doubling down just days ago proves.

Standing outside an early voting location at a public library in Ferguson, on the same streets where she led protests for racial justice in 2014, Ms. Bush declined to call Hamas a terrorist group.

“We were called terrorists during Ferguson,” she said of herself and other Black activists who took to the streets after the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, by a white police officer. “Have they hurt people? Absolutely. Has the Israeli military hurt people? Absolutely.”

Ms. Bush said that she was reluctant to classify Hamas as a terrorist group given how little she knows about it.

“Would they qualify to me as a terrorist organization? Yes. But do I know that? Absolutely not,” Ms. Bush said. “I have no communication with them. All I know is that we were considered terrorists, we were considered Black identity extremists and all we were doing was trying to get peace. I’m not trying to compare us, but that taught me to be careful about labeling if I don’t know.”

Those who are left on her staff had to try some damage control after those comments.

Later, a spokeswoman for Ms. Bush sought to walk back her comments. “The congresswoman knows Hamas is a terrorist organization,” the spokeswoman, Marina Chafa, said. The issue, she added, was that the term had been “weaponized by the far right consistently to justify violence and in this instance, the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”

Current polling between Cori Bush and Wesley Bell shows a tight race, with Bell anywhere from one point to six points ahead, depending on the poll. Will Bush’s anti-Semitism, coupled with the new audio leak of her admission to her staff, lead to her defeat in the Missouri primary election today? One can hope that given the choice between two progressive Democrats, the people of St. Louis would go with the one NOT cheering on a terror group and treating her office like a personal slush fund. We shall see after the polls close tonight.

Featured image: Representative Cori Bush via US Department of Labor Flickr, cropped, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)