Aipac Turns to Cori Bush After Helping To Defeat a Fellow ‘Squad’ Member, Jamaal Bowman

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is training its eye on another “Squad” member — Congresswoman Cori Bush — after successfully helping to defeat her fellow progressive, Congressman Jamaal Bowman, in a Democratic primary on Tuesday. The group says it is prepared to spend millions of dollars ahead of Ms. Bush’s August 6 Missouri primary. She is facing a strong challenger in St. Louis County’s prosecuting attorney, Wesley Bell, who is backed by Aipac. The group’s outside spending arm, United Democracy Project, has already spent more than $2 million in the Bush-Bell contest, and is expected to spend even more in the coming weeks after pouring more than $14 million into Mr. Bowman’s race. Aipac’s spending at New York’s 16th District helped make that election the most expensive House primary in American history. Ms. Bush’s standing among constituents appears to be slipping after winning the Democratic nomination and the general election easily in 2022. According to a poll released Wednesday from the Democratic Majority for Israel, she trails Mr. Bell by one point. In January, the same DFMI poll found Mr. Bell trailing by 16 points. “Indeed, Bell’s vote and margin increased across every major demographic — among whites and Blacks, among men and women, among those over and under 50 years old, and both inside and outside the city of St. Louis,” the president of DFMI, Mark Mellman, said in his polling memo. “This primary race is essentially tied but clearly moving in Wesley Bell’s direction.”Ms. Bush — like Mr. Bowman and other “Squad” members — has embraced the anti-Israel crowd since the October 7 attacks. Less than 10 days after the Hamas terrorists struck in southern Israel, Ms. Bush and others introduced a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire at Gaza.“Today I am introducing the Ceasefire Now Resolution, vital legislation that calls for de-escalation and an immediate ceasefire in Israel and Occupied Palestine,” Ms. Bush said in a statement on October 16, just three days after Israeli military forces began ground operations at Gaza. “We can’t bomb our way to peace, equality, and freedom,” Ms. Bush wrote. She was one of just a handful of House members to co-sponsor a resolution commemorating the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe” in Arabic, referring to the establishment of Israel in 1948. She also voted against a resolution that declared that Israel is “not a racist or apartheid state” and a resolution that condemned the Iranian missile attacks on Israel.Ms. Bush did vote for a resolution condemning sexual abuse by Hamas against Israelis, but said that the text had “shortcomings” because it ignored “the well-documented cases of rampant sexual and gender-based violence toward Palestinians by the Israeli military.”Ms. Bush, who, like Mr. Bowman and other “Squad” members, helped knock off longtime Democratic incumbents in 2018 and 2020, has served in the House for just two terms. She also enters this brutal stretch of campaigning against Mr. Bell at a financial disadvantage. According to the latest filings with the Federal Elections Commission, Ms. Bush has less than $530,000 in her campaign war chest, compared to Mr. Bell’s more than $1.1 million. Since entering the race just in October, Mr. Bell has raised more than $1.7 million, while Ms. Bush has raised $1.5 million in the last 18 months. Much of the online furor at Ms. Bush stems from her anti-Israel positions. A comedian and longtime Democrat, Michael Rapaport, said on X on Tuesday shortly before Mr. Bowman’s defeat that Ms. Bush would be the next anti-Israel lawmaker to fall. “You’re about to lose next,” he wrote. In the race for local endorsements, Ms. Bush has so far had a lackluster showing — a sign of unusual weakness for an incumbent House member that foreshadowed Mr. Bowman’s defeat after losing the support of local elected officials ahead of his primary. The mayor of St. Louis, Tishaura Jones, has yet to endorse either Ms. Bush or Mr. Bell, telling Spectrum News that she would like to interview both candidates before making a decision. In June, the AFL-CIO, an extremely powerful labor union, especially in the Midwest, announced that it would not endorse in the First District primary even though Ms. Bush received a 100 percent rating from the union in 2023. As with Mr. Bowman’s fire alarm embarrassment that led some to question his ethics, Ms. Bush is fighting accusations that she improperly used campaign funds for personal use. She is under investigation by the Department of Justice, though the Office of Congressional Ethics also investigated and found no wrongdoing. “I hold myself, my campaign, and my position to the highest levels of integrity. I also believe in transparency, which is why I can confirm that the Department of Justice is reviewing my campaign’s spending on security services,” Ms. Bush said in a statement in January. Her use of “security services” was questioned by some, given that more famous members of the Squad, including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar — both of whom have faced a significant number of death threats in the past — do not have private security details. During her 2022 campaign, Ms. Bush sent more than $60,000 to her now-husband for those “security services,” though they were not married at the time she retained him. She says he has “extensive experience in this area,” and kept him on the payroll during the first quarter of 2024 — at a rate of $5,000 a month.

Aipac Turns to Cori Bush After Helping To Defeat a Fellow ‘Squad’ Member, Jamaal Bowman

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