Members of The Squad Spend Campaign Funds on "Security" While Campaigning to "Defund the Police"

Put this one right up there in the category with politicians who travel with heavily armed protection details while advocating for gun confiscation laws that would violate the Second Amendment.

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The Daily Caller has taken some time to examine the campaign spending reports of a few members of the “The Squad” — first and second term members of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Presley — and took note of various expenditures listed as “security,” “security consulting,” and “security services.”

The members of The Squad are quite well known for their calls to “Defund the Police”.  But they aren’t quite as forthcoming with their “calls” for security services when they deem them necessary for their own safety and well-being.

AOC made quite a splash in June 2020 when she responded on Instagram to a question about what would “Defund the Police” look like in practice.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is among the proponents of the call to defund the police, and a recent post on her Instagram story on the subject quickly went viral, after it was screenshotted and shared by Twitter user Ashley Quan. Asked, “What does an America with defunded police look like to you?” Ocasio-Cortez responded, “It looks like a suburb.”

Later in June, in a response to the announcement by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio that he was cutting the NYPD budget by $1 billion, AOC responded:

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“Defunding police means defunding police,” the congresswoman said in a statement. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math. It does not mean moving school police officers from the NYPD budget to the Department of Education’s budget so the exact same police remain in schools.”

Ocasio-Cortez said that cutting the police budget is not effective if it does not result in the reduced presence of law enforcement.

“It does not mean counting overtime cuts as cuts, even as NYPD ignores every attempt by City Council to curb overtime spending and overspends on overtime anyways,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “If these reports are accurate, then these proposed ‘cuts’ to the NYPD budget are a disingenuous illusion. This is not a victory. The fight to defund policing continues.”

The Daily Caller has reviewed AOC’s campaign spending reports for the first quarter of 2021, and found a bit of a “Defund for Thee but Not for Me” situation going on with her.

In January, February, and March of 2021, Ocasio-Cortez spent $3,000 per month on a security consultant based out of Brooklyn, New York. Records show she spent a total of $9,000 for 3 months of security consulting from this one company.

  • On Jan. 25, 2021, Ocasio-Cortez spent $24,279.13 on “security.”
  • On Jan. 19, 2021, she spent $3,986.60 on “security services.”
  • On Feb. 2., Ocasio-Cortez spent $849.22 on “security services.”
  • On Feb. 25, Ocasio-Cortez spent $1552.50 at 24 & 7 Security & Investigation, Inc., which her office said was for a “security detail in Houston.”
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Rep. Ilhan Omar from Minnesota has been an even more vocal advocate of “defund the police,” calling for the dismantling of the Minneapolis Police Department.

“What we are saying is the current infrastructure that exists as policing in our city should not exist anymore and we can’t go about creating a different process with the same infrastructure in place,” she added.

Omar said the way forward is to dismantle the department and look at funding priorities in order to reimagine a new system.

Here is what the Daily Caller uncovered regarding Omar’s spending on her own security in Minnesota:

Omar, who also supports defunding the police, spent $3,103.61 on her own security in her state of Minnesota, according to her April Quarterly 2021 financial report:

  • On Jan. 20, 2021, Omar spent $66.97 on “Security Services.”
  • On Jan. 29, 2021, Ilhan Omar spent $202.70 on Security “Services.”
  • On Feb. 19, 2021, Ilhan Omar spent $66.97 on “Security Services.”
  • On Feb. 26, 2021, Omar spent $2,700 on “Security Services.”
  • On March 16, 2021, Ilhan Omar spent $66.97 on “Security Services.”

Granted, the amounts spent by Omar are not large, but these are funds she is spending for security while she is in Minnesota in just the first three months of 2021.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley from Massachusetts has also called for “Defunding the Police.”

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Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley said she supports efforts to defund police departments during a TIME100 Talks discussion on Thursday, because the movement is “about the investment in our communities which have historically been divested from.”

Pressly has sponsored legislation in Congress to accomplish some of her goals.

Under the bill, federal funds to local police and federal agencies would be slashed and diverted to pay for health care, education, environmental housing programs. It would eliminate federal programs and agencies used to finance Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the controversial Department of Defense 1033 program, which transfers excess military equipment to civilian law enforcement agencies.

But as the Daily Caller reported, Pressley has found the need “Fund the Police” — at least as they are working to protect her.

Pressley, another avid supporter of defunding the police, spent $4,186.75 on “Security Services,” according to her April Quarterly 2021 financial report:

  • On Jan. 26, 2021, Pressley spent $1,292.00 while in her home state.
  • On Jan. 27, 2021, Pressley spent $1,267.50 for security in Alexandria, Virginia.
  • On March 4, 2021, Pressley spent $675.25 in ADT security, which is based in Boca Raton, Florida.
  • On March 9, 2021, Pressley spent $252.00 while in her home state.
  • On March 19, 2021, Pressley spent $700.00 for a security company in Washington D.C. called LGC Security LLC.
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As was reported here earlier today, it is somewhat humorous to find that Cong. Maxine Waters requested special security from the Capitol Police for her trip to Minneapolis on Saturday — where she called for increasingly violent confrontations with police in the streets if former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin is not convicted of murder this week.  I guess she knew in advance what she was going to demand, so she knew it would be a good idea to take along security to protect herself from her own words.

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