Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), who is facing a tough fight for reelection ahead of Tuesday’s primary, attended a late-July rally for her campaign organized by a pro-Kremlin activist in St. Louis with a history of criticizing the head of the Congressional Black Caucus Political Action Committee, which is backing her in Tuesday’s Democratic primary.

On July 20, the Universal African Peoples Organization and its chairman, Lavoy “Zaki Baruti” Reed, assembled Bush supporters at the Beloved Community United Methodist Church in St. Louis’ Gate District. The incumbent congresswoman, who faces a serious challenge from St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, subsequently posted a photo to Facebook of herself at the event with Baruti, who has backed her since her first bid for federal office in 2016.

Baruti has a long-running relationship with another activist who came to prominence amid the protest movement following the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.: Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, also called the Uhuru movement. In December 2014, the pair convened a “black people’s grand jury” to hear the evidence against Brown’s shooter, Officer Darren Wilson, and in the succeeding years the duo participated jointly in events held by the “Black is Back Coalition” and served together on the National Black Radical Convention’s organizing committee.

The two were even photographed together wearing matching Soviet-style ushankas, complete with red star-shaped pins emblazoned with the hammer-and-sickle.

But according to a federal indictment unsealed April 2023, that entire time Yeshitela and two of his associates in the African People’s Socialist Party served as illegal agents of Russia’s FSB intelligence service, pushing Kremlin narratives in America while accepting financing and amplification from Moscow’s undercover operatives. Foreshadowing the criminal allegations was a Federal Bureau of Investigation raid on Yeshitela’s St. Louis home in July 2022.

In addition to attending a press conference with Yeshitela in the wake of FBI action, Baruti showed his support at a Zoom rally for the Uhuru chair in early 2023. On the call, Baruti lashed out at Rep. Greg Meeks (D-NY) for backing Ukraine in its conflict with Moscow and for proposing the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act in 2022, a bill Bush voted for. Meeks is the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and chairs the CBC PAC, one of the most important institutions now backing Bush.

“A Negro congressman, I just have to call him Meeks, has proposed and maybe passed some type of legislation right that would penalize people for being — African countries for siding with Russia in essence,” Baruti said, following a preamble in which he praised Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. “I want to just salute those countries that had the audacity to resist these, I always say, wicked people. Because to me they are like vampires.”

Baruti returned to this theme later as he struggled to recall the exact name of Meeks’ bill, which sought to develop a strategy to undercut Moscow’s meddling on the continent. In doing so, he reiterated a favorite Kremlin talking point: that the United States, which had drawn down its troop strength in Europe for decades, had provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest.

“The act where this Negro was pushing, Gregory Meeks, penalty for anybody criticizing the United States/NATO aggression against Russia,” Baruti said.

Nor did Baruti distance himself from Yeshitela, who has pleaded not guilty, following the indictment itself. In January, Baruti had the accused Russian agent on his TV show, which airs on a local evangelical Christian channel, to discuss how American support for Ukraine was part of a “more than 100 years old assault against Russia” to extinguish the flame of its communist revolution. 

In the interview, Yeshitela repeated a common Russian claim that the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, is controlled by Nazis.

Neither the Bush campaign, Meeks’ office, nor the Congressional Black Caucus PAC responded to repeated requests for comment. In a phone interview, Baruti asserted he had been the first to recruit Bush to run for office in 2016, and that he and the UAPO supported her this year because of her call for a ceasefire in the Israeli-Hamas conflict.

He again defended Yeshitela, and denied the accused Kremlin operative had ever requested his assistance in advancing pro-Russia talking points.

“The charges against Chairman Omali Yeshitela is a continuation of a policy of coming after anyone who criticizes this country as far as foreign policy,” Baruti said. “We just have similar ideas.”

Bush’s defeat would mark a second consecutive defeat for the left-wing Squad, after Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) lost the Democratic nomination for his seat to Westchester County Executive George Latimer in June.