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On Tuesday, Republican primary voters in central Florida will decide whether Rep. Cory Mills should once again be their party’s nominee for Congress. In doing so, they will weigh the value of the congressman’s “Complete and Total Endorsement” from President Donald Trump versus the reality of voting for a man whose past 18 months look like this:
- February 2025: Washington, DC, police nearly arrest Mills after a girlfriend calls 911 and accuses him of domestic assault; she recants the accusation after reportedly being pressured to do so by the congressman.
- May 2025: Army veterans accuse Mills of obtaining a Bronze Star through stolen valor.
- August 2025: An ex-girlfriend—whom Mills was cheating on with the partner who accused him of abuse—seeks a restraining order against Mills after the congressman is accused of threatening to potentially share explicit videos recorded during their relationship.
- October 2025: A Florida judge grants the restraining order after finding that a key part of the congressman’s testimony in the “dating violence” case had not been “truthful.”
- November 2025: The House Ethics Committee establishes a subcommittee to investigate allegations against Mills.
- May 2026: The ethics committee reveals that it has authorized more than 20 subpoenas and obtained thousands of documents as part of its investigation into “serious and complex” allegations against Mills.
- July 2026: NBC News reports that Mills is under investigation by the Department of Justice; sources tell ABC News that the investigation is partly about his finances. Mills responds by saying there is no confirmation that he is under investigation.
The full list of Mills’ many controversies is much longer. If Mills wins on Tuesday, it will be a testament not only to the power of a Trump endorsement but also to a Republican Party that has turned the other way when it comes to allegations of egregious misconduct. From there, he will have to win a general election in a Republican-leaning district Democrats hope to flip this year.
If Mills is defeated, he will become the fourth man in Congress this year to lose his job or retire early after being accused of misconduct against women. In April, Reps. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) resigned after facing potential expulsion. Earlier this month, Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) announced that he was ending his reelection bid after the ethics committee recommended that he be censured. Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has so far refused to step down in response to groundbreaking reporting from my colleague Abby Vesoulis about allegations of domestic abuse by Miller.
Mills may become the first of these men to lose his job at the ballot box, rather than by resigning or retiring. Ryan Elijah, a former local TV news anchor, is in a strong position to potentially defeat Mills on Tuesday. He outraised Mills last month and received the endorsement of two of Mills’ GOP colleagues in Florida: Reps. Mike Haridopolos and Anna Paulina Luna. Mills, meanwhile, brought in only about $16,000 in July—an abysmal amount for a sitting congressman. (One of Mills’ biggest recent campaign donors is another Florida man who attracted the attention of the ethics committee: former Rep. Matt Gaetz.)
Public polling in the race remains limited; a recent survey showed Mills leading by 6 points with 41 percent of voters still undecided. The share of undecided voters does not reflect well on Mills, who was first elected in 2022 and has had years to earn the support of his constituents. Trump’s advisers may also be trying to distance themselves; the president did not include Mills in a string of social media posts last week touting candidates he has endorsed in Florida. On Friday, Gov. Ron DeSantis added to Mills’ problems, saying “I have not endorsed Cory Mills, and I do not support Cory Mills.”
As he fights to stay in office, Mills has stuck to a Trumpian playbook of denial and deception. He has said that he was not involved in any criminal or civil proceedings when Trump endorsed him in February 2026. That is true but only barely: The restraining order placed on him in Florida by Judge Fred Koberlein Jr. had recently expired. Mills has also downplayed the restraining order by calling it a “social media injunction.” That is not accurate. Koberlein barred Mills from contacting his ex-girlfriend Lindsey Langston, and going within 500 feet of her home and place of work. As part of the order, the judge also banned him from directly referring to Langston on social media because he felt that doing so was necessary to protect her from additional “dating violence.”
In a similar vein, Mills has claimed that he has “never gone to any proceedings.” It’s true that he has never been criminally charged, but he spent hours in court proceedings during the restraining order case last year. He has also stated that “no one ever claimed” he committed domestic abuse. That is also false. Police body-camera footage obtained by the Washington Post and a police report obtained by NBC4 Washington show Sarah Raviani, the girlfriend who called 911, did accuse him of abuse.
Raviani later told the officer that “he wants me to say” that the bruises and marks on her body “were from our vacation and that I bruise easily.” The officer believed that she was talking to Mills on the phone at that time. Raviani went on to retract her allegations, saying that the bruising came from riding a camel during a trip to Dubai with Mills.
One aspect of Mills’ biography that has attracted relatively little attention is his pattern of dating young women involved in Republican politics. Langston was in her early twenties and nearly two decades Mills’ junior when the two began dating in 2021. Sarah Raviani was 27 when she called 911 to report alleged abuse by the then-44-year-old congressman. Raviani co-founded a group called “Iranians for Trump”; Langston has served as a state committee member for the Florida GOP.
In 2023, Mills began dating a woman who had graduated from high school in 2022, according to reporting by the independent journalist Roger Sollenberger. The congressman was in his 40s at the time; she would have been 19 or 20 and working in Republican politics, according to public records.
I asked Mills via text message if he disputed dating the woman and whether he dated a 19-year-old while a member of Congress. Mills replied, “Mother Jones’ slanderous and misleading comments, combined with Roger Sollenberger’s continued false accusations from known leftist media, makes your request absurd.”
He continued, “There’s nothing illegal about two consenting adults dating. The obsession over a man’s dating life is disturbing at best. I’ve been separated from my now ex-wife years prior to our divorce finalizing. Whether in office or as a private citizen, adults are entitled to date in their attempt to find their person. Sometimes you get lucky and find that immediately, but many are not so blessed. Feel free to run your new and slanderous hit piece.”
When I profiled Mills earlier this year, untangling the congressman’s many dubious claims took months of reporting. I ended up speaking with 18 people who have known Mills from his youth to the present day. The picture they painted was almost universally unflattering.
As one former associate put it to me, Mills is a “human fucking trainwreck.” Others called him a “little bitch,” “repulsive and vile,” and a “schmuck bordering on being a douchebag.” Adam Ehrhardt, a medic who served under Mills in the Army, called his former sergeant a “pathological liar.”
Mills’ time testifying in the restraining order case last year raised more doubts about the congressman’s honesty. While on the stand, the congressman told Langston’s lawyer that he was not in divorce proceedings. Langston’s attorney then revealed that she was holding the paperwork from Mills’ ongoing divorce in her hand. “He lied in front of a judge,” Langston said in an interview with a Florida news outlet this month. “He lied under oath.”
Judge Koberlein made a similar suggestion when assessing Mills’ claim that he no longer had access to intimate videos of Langston. As Koberlein put it in his decision granting the restraining order: “The Court, considering the totality of the testimony and circumstances, does not find [Mills’] testimony concerning the intimate videos to be truthful.”
Mills has been similarly deceitful about his military record. He has claimed to have been a member of Joint Special Operations Command, the elite group that oversees much of US special operations forces. Service records for Mills released by the Army provide no evidence that he was part of US special forces. An Army official also told me that Mills “attended Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) in 2002 but did not complete the course.” Former military contractors who worked with Mills in Iraq and Afghanistan told me he claimed to have been an Army Ranger, an Army sniper, and a special forces qualified medic. None of that is supported by Mills’ service records.
Most egregiously, Mills has been accused of obtaining a Bronze Star under false pretenses. To justify the Bronze Star, Mills has produced the official form used to nominate him for the award. The document, which was submitted about 18 years or more after the alleged heroic acts it describes, claims that Mills saved the lives of two comrades “while under intense enemy fire” in Iraq in 2003. One of those men, Joe Heit, has told me and NOTUS that Mills did not save his life. Heit said he has no memory of ever seeing Mills in Iraq. The other person whose life Mills supposedly saved is a former medic who was grievously wounded rushing to Heit’s aid. That soldier’s mother has said that he has no memory of the battle.
The Bronze Star form also claims that, during a different battle, Mills saved the life of a third soldier by bounding forward under “murderous enemy fire.” From there, it states that Mills subdued an “enemy insurgent” who had captured Sgt. First Class Joe Ferrand. Ferrand has written in a statement shared with congressional investigators that he “solemnly swear[s]” that the story is entirely made up. “The act never took place,” he wrote. “The event never happened.”
I asked Mills on Sunday if he stands by the claim that he saved Ferrand’s life. In response, he texted me an Army record that shows he received a Bronze Star, and said that there are “confirmed audits” and validation of his awards by the Army and the Department of War. The real question is whether the award was obtained through false claims of heroism. I asked Mills three times if he still claims to have saved Ferrand’s life; he responded to each of those messages without addressing the question.
The full scope of Mills’ misrepresentations is much broader. He first ran for Congress by presenting himself as a successful businessman. Court records I reviewed make clear that his business, Pacem Defense, which specialized in selling grenades to foreign militaries, was falling apart when he first ran for office. Since entering Congress, he claims to have stepped away from Pacem Defense and related businesses by placing those assets in a “blind trust.”
Kedric Payne, vice president and general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, told me earlier this year the set up of Mills’ blind trust does not make sense because his financial disclosure forms list the share he owns in the companies that are in it. As Payne noted, “If you can see what your holdings are, it is not a blind trust.”
Late last year, Pacem indefinitely furloughed many of its workers as it was hounded in court for tens of millions of dollars in unpaid debt. Still, Pacem managed to keep money flowing to at least one company. A filing in another lawsuit filed against Pacem shows that it paid $12,000 per month in rent to a company called Pacem Estate Holdings during the period when its workers were furloughed. Mills owns 100 percent of Pacem Estate Holdings, according to his congressional financial disclosure. In short, Pacem stopped paying workers but apparently kept money flowing to a company wholly owned by Mills.
Like many of Mills’ former associates, Florida primary voters who take the time to look into the congressman may similarly decide they want nothing to do with him. Or they could pull the lever for a congressman their president called a “Tremendous Champion for the Great People” of his district.
