A former aide for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is now working as a senior official for the New York State Communist Party.
According to the New York Post, Justine Medina, an ex-aide, was employed by Ocasio-Cortez as a political organizer in 2020, receiving over $35,000.
Former aide to @AOC, Justine Medina, is now working as a senior official in the New York State Communist Party.
Source: NY PostWho's surprised?
— The Patriot Hammer (@patriot_hammer) May 14, 2023
After the 2020 election, Medina began working as a communist. In July 2021, she became the “co-chair of the New York Young Communist League,” as reported by the Communist Party newspaper People’s World. The newspaper now identifies Medina as a member of the “Executive Committee of the New York State Communist Party.”
Social media records show that Medina’s communist-leaning ideas became fully established before and during her employment with Ocasio-Cortez.
“Well, I am a Communist, but work for AOC,” Medina said in an October 2020 archived tweet. “Communism is about equality, democracy, peace, the advancement of workers, the oppressed, and humanity in general,” she added in November 2020.
“It is true the path there will be unkind to those who block progress, but Communism is good and should not scare you,” she noted in the same tweet.
In March 2023, Medina noted that while working for Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, she was responsible for “organizing & writing policy language with Anti-War Veterans & the Peace Movement.” Ocasio-Cortez follows Medina on Twitter, and both have posed for pictures together in recent history.
Medina was involved in successful efforts to unionize Amazon’s workforce. She bragged about such efforts in an article for “Communist Party USA,” which identified her as a packager at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York.
Medina also has a history of prior arrests. She was reportedly booked at least twice in June 2020 during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots. On Twitter, she complained that cops’ zip ties were too tight. According to The New Yorker, Medina was also detained in 2020 for trying to deface a plaque honoring former real-estate developer and businessman Fred Trump.
Medina comes from a family of wealth. Her father, Omar Medina, is a wealthy Cuban-American trial attorney based in Tampa, Florida, whose license was suspended for 30 days in 2013 after he made false statements on behalf of a client, the Tampa Bay Business Journal reported.
Omar now lives in a five-bedroom, six-bathroom mansion in Tampa worth more than $3 million. Records show he has donated to President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Despite having a Marxist daughter, Omar said he couldn’t be further from sharing the same political beliefs as his daughter, calling her “misguided.”
“As for her allegiance to the Communist Party, I could not be further removed from that. It’s a big problem,” Omar Medina told The Post. “My family escaped communism, and my daughter is misguided as to the benefits that political system provides, it flat out doesn’t work.”
