U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-Missouri, is moving her congressional office after she said she and her staff were berated in the hallway by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia.
Bush sent out a release Friday afternoon that said the incident occurred Jan. 13 when she and her staff were walking in a hallway.
“I was in the tunnel between the Cannon Office Building and the Capitol when Marjorie Taylor Greene came up from behind me, ranting loudly into her phone, while not wearing a mask,” Bush wrote. This happened one day after multiple Republicans announced they tested positive for COVID-19 after being in a room with Taylor Greene during the Capitol riots, Bush said.
“Out of concern for the health of my staff, other members of Congress, and their congressional staff, I repeatedly called out to her to put on a mask,” Bush wrote. “Taylor Greene and her staff responded by berating me, with one staffer yelling, ‘Stop inciting violence with Black Lives Matter.”
Taylor Greene tweeted out Friday the approximately one-minute video she was recording that day. She’s seen denouncing the attack on the Capitol and criticizing Democrats’ support of the multiple Black Lives Matter protest last year before someone can be heard yelling at her to wear her mask — after a brief, albeit heated, back and forth the video ends.
Bush said due to this and other instances with Green, her office is being moved away from Taylor Greene’s office and out of the Longworth House Office Building.
“In context of Taylor Greene’s repeated endorsements of executing Democratic politicians before taking office, Taylor Greene’s renewed, repeated antagonization of the movement for Black lives in the last month directed towards me personally is a cause for serious concern,” Bush wrote.
Bush said Taylor Greene also called her out on MLK Day, accusing her of leading a mob calling for “the rape, murder and burning of the home” of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who pointed firearms at peaceful protestors passing in front of their home on Portland Place in St. Louis on June 28.
Taylor Greene’s Jan. 18 tweet read: ”@CoriBush did you denounce radical BLM violence and apologize to the McCloskey’s? ‘Cori Bush is a BLM activist who led the mob that called for the rape, murder, and burning of the home of Patty and Mark McCloskey of St. Louis.’”
The quote about Bush was taken from Texas GOP Chairman Allen West.
“You instigated and attacked me, not the other way around, “ Marjorie Greene wrote on Twitter Friday in response to Bush. “You got caught in a lie. You support and encourage BLM domestic terror. You led a mob to threaten the lives of the McCloskey’s. Stop playing the victim, Rep. @CoriBush.”
Bush appeared on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” with Joy Reid Friday evening.
“I moved my office because I am here to do a job for the people of St. Louis, they deserve that,” she told Reid. “And what I cannot do is continue to look over my shoulder wondering if a white supremacist in Congress by the name of Marjorie Taylor Greene, or anyone else, cause there are others, that they are doing something or conspiring against us. Our focus has to be St. Louis and the work we can get done.”