‘George Santos With a Gun,’ Part II: Blind Trust
When it comes to his finances, GOP Rep. Cory Mills has a lot of explaining to do.
During the 2020 election cycle, Cory Mills surprised people close to him when he decided, seemingly overnight, that he wanted to be a congressman.
Mills—an international arms dealer who also represents Florida’s 7th district as a MAGA Republican loyalist in the U.S. House of Representatives—had never previously expressed personal interest in public office or politics generally, according to five people formerly close to Mills. In hindsight, these people told me, the timing was curious.
Today, Mills’s finances and business dealings are part of a sweeping House Ethics Committee probe. Ethics is acting on a referral from the Office of Congressional Conduct, a nonpartisan congressional investigative body which this spring found that Mills has likely broken federal contracting and campaign finance laws. The Ethics Committee has broadened the scope to include potential misuse of official resources, leveraging congressional stature to curry favors, unreported gifts from overseas trips, and Mills’s treatment of women, including “dating violence” allegations adjudicated in a restraining order a Florida judge awarded to an ex-girlfriend in October.
Central to both investigations, however, is the true source of roughly $2 million in “personal loans” Mills gave to his campaign.
According to legal experts and a review of court records, campaign filings, and personal and corporate financial statements, those “personal” funds appear more likely tied to a different source: tens of millions of dollars in corporate loans Mills secured from a foreign lender to bail out his moribund weapons dealing business, PACEM.
Such an arrangement could trip a number of federal statutes, legal experts said, potentially including laws against foreign contributions, corporate contributions, straw donations, and false statement. Mills has denied these allegations.
But there’s more mystery to the loans. That’s because Mills has also failed to disclose PACEM’s debt on his annual ethics statements to Congress. Members of Congress and candidates are not legally required to disclose corporate liabilities unless they’re personally liable for the debt. Mills is personally liable for PACEM’s outstanding debt—including an “unlimited guaranty”—and has been since at least 2019, according to court filings and financial records. But Mills, who sits on the House committees for both Armed Services and Foreign Affairs, has never reported the tens of millions of dollars PACEM owes its foreign backers, even in the recent flurry of corrections he filed as Ethics launched its probe.
The debt is existential. Today, PACEM—a weapons manufacturing and security consulting firm Mills co-founded with his wife in 2014—owes a whopping $66 million, court filings show. That’s anywhere between six and 33 times what Mills’s disclosures say the company is worth. Today, the company is being foreclosed on in court.
My review of Mills’s congressional disclosures, campaign filings, and corporate and financial records, along with interviews with legal experts, found a staggering number of omissions and irregularities—including what are, on paper, numerous violations of government disclosure laws. In this report, I’ll explain those findings and why they’re so significant. I’ll keep it as light as I can, but some of the financial reporting unavoidably gets a bit dense.
Key points include:
around $2 million in potentially illegal campaign loans;
repeated failure to disclose at least nine corporate entities to Congress, including three foreign entities;
repeated failure to disclose tens of millions of dollars in debt to a foreign lender;
claiming to have a “blind” trust that is not actually blind;
collecting hundreds of thousands and potentially millions in “rent”—and reportedly bags of cash—from PACEM, while drawing tens of thousands of dollars a year in taxpayer funds for personal lodging and meal costs;
extravagant spending on himself and girlfriends while his company floundered;
an attempt to get the SBA to pay off a PACEM corporate loan with COVID funds, which the SBA found unlawful; and
attempts to obscure his corporate conflicts of interest to Congress while PACEM depended on federal authorization to export lethal weapons.
It’s unclear why Mills has withheld so much financial and business information from his ethics disclosures. Jordan Libowitz, vice president of communications at watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the omissions mean many of Mills’s financial relationships are not yet publicly known, and some of them raise blazing red flags.
“Public service is based on public trust,” Libowitz told me. “An apparent failure to disclose both positions in foreign entities as well as millions in foreign debt raise serious questions as to whether this was an oversight or if Mills was trying to hide something. Something is off about the situation, and Mills needs to be transparent as to what’s going on, because it doesn’t look good.”
Interestingly, Mills agrees—at least in theory.
Last December, days after the OCC first announced it was investigating him, Mills promoted his interview with Fox Business host Stuart Varney where Mills argued for a ban on congressional stock trades, “especially when they sit on certain committees of jurisdiction that gives them an insider track as to what is being passed and what is not.”
“Public service is about serving the American people,” Mills told Varney. “If you come into Congress and you come out a lot wealthier than what you came in, then you served yourself and your own purposes; you didn’t serve the American people.”
RUNNING DEBT
According to five sources formerly close to Mills, he started talking about running for Congress a little after PACEM started taking out loans. This would mean that just as the company Mills founded was amassing an expensive and risky expansion, Mills was looking for another job—one that would in practice require him to sever his business ties.
Mills—whose longtime corporate counsel, Joseph E. Schmitz, was an early foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, joining with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos—began building his political profile in 2019. Until that year, Mills had never given money to a state or federal candidate, according to campaign finance records. But in 2019 and 2020, Federal Election Commission records show, he gave almost $100,000, split among a number of Republican committees and Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, whom five sources said Mills pursued heavily.
In April 2021, although Mills still lived in Virginia (as he had just sworn in a financial agreement), he acquired a Florida driver’s license and registered to vote in the Sunshine State at a friend’s address, Orange County records show. Seven days later, Mills filed his candidacy with the FEC.
Republican Party brass were attracted to Mills early on not just because of his connections, but also because of his commitment to self-fund his campaign, according to two people familiar with the discussions. But court filings and financial records raise the question of just how Mills planned to get that money.
That’s because PACEM was on financial life support. The company had scored access to tens of millions of dollars in loans in the spring of 2019, OPMWire first reported, sourced from Canadian asset management firm Ninepoint Partners. But by the end of that year, court filings show, PACEM was in trouble—they had still managed to default on a $5 million SBA loan, which Mills had personally guaranteed with his McLean, Virginia, mansion.
That loan is a story of its own: PACEM stopped making payments altogether in 2020, court records show, despite separately receiving an additional combined $1.2 million in SBA-backed COVID funds. (Mills, who has been saddled with tax and personal liens on and off since 2011, had also failed to pay his 2020 Virginia property taxes.) The company also rewrote its loan agreement during COVID so the SBA would pay off its debt with emergency CARES Act funds—a move the SBA later told PACEM’s bank was unlawful, court filings show. When the SBA pulled PACEM’s loan from service in the spring of 2020, PACEM had only repaid $350,000 of the $5 million. In early 2021, PACEM’s bank began the liquidation process.
At this point—just days before filing his candidacy for Congress—Mills was facing potential ruin. He swore in an agreement with his bank that he, his wife, and PACEM combined couldn’t come up with $1.6 million to save the business and their own house. When he made his first campaign loan, on April 7, 2021, it was for just $500, according to the filing. But, as Mills knew at the time, PACEM was about to get a bailout—a new $27.3 million package from Ninepoint. The loans came through on May 28, 2021. The next month, Mills cut his first six-figure campaign check, for $200,000, FEC records show.
Over the next two years, Mills—who couldn’t scrape together $1.6 million in 2021—loaned his campaign nearly $2 million. Court filings show that PACEM continued to make loan negotiations with Ninepoint as Mills pushed more money into his political efforts. The campaign has still never repaid him a dollar.
Legal experts questioned the true source of these “personal” funds, citing the timing of the loans, financial and business records, and inconsistencies in Mills’s congressional disclosures. Mills, however, denies wrongdoing. He often cites a 2024 FEC investigation into his campaign, which unanimously dismissed allegations that the loans derived from corporate funds, citing in part Mills’s stated earnings on his financial disclosures and an affidavit from a PACEM official attesting that Mills had rightfully collected payments from his business.
But Mills doesn’t mention that the FEC’s legal analysis included a major caveat: It’s “not within the jurisdiction” of the FEC to evaluate the accuracy of the claims on his congressional financial disclosures.
The Office of Congressional Conduct, however, does have that jurisdiction. And the OCC found that irregularities in Mills’ disclosures—such as mysteriously doubling a previously stated salary and a bank account—provided “substantial reason to believe” that Mills lied about the source of his campaign loans. The OCC also noted that Mills, PACEM, and other witnesses refused to cooperate, finding that the “concerted effort to limit [OCC’s] access to relevant information, often from witnesses also represented by Rep. Mills’s attorney, undermined these investigative efforts.” (Mills’s attorney also referred the OCC to the FEC’s report.)
Brett Kappel, an expert in campaign finance and government ethics law at Harmon Curran, echoed the OCC’s conclusion about the loans, saying Mills’s denial “defies credulity.”
“Given the conflict between the information in the public record and Representative Mills’s changing claims about his income, it defies credulity to believe that he financed his 2022 campaign entirely with personal funds,” Kappel said.
“None of this adds up,” said Brendan Fischer, a specialist in campaign finance and government ethics law. Fischer allowed it was “theoretically possible” that Mills chose to pour half his family’s stated household income into his campaign but said such a scenario “strains credulity.”
A source with knowledge of the matter told me that Mills’s wife, Rana Alsaadi, was recently surprised to learn about the campaign loans—and wasn’t aware Mills had given his campaign any money at all. The couple separated in March 2023, according to divorce proceedings they filed this summer.
Mills won the 2022 election by 17 points. He soon began stripping his name from PACEM corporate filings. But a number of PACEM entities—including foreign entities—have never appeared on his disclosures, as required by law. Asked about these omissions in a July phone call, Mills told me “everything has been disclosed.”
Since then, Mills has disclosed a significant amount of new information, including in a recent batch of amended reports he filed on Nov. 20, the day after House Ethics publicized its investigation. (Mills filed amendments during the OCC investigation, as well, which the OCC said compounded his problems.)
But these new filings appear incomplete.
Until this year, Mills’s disclosures appear to have omitted his relationships with a number of corporate entities. That includes at least three holding companies and three foreign entities Mills fully owns, according to court filings: PACEM North Canada Inc.; PACEM Solution International Pakistan Pvt. Ltd.; and PACEM Solutions International DMCC, a branch Mills personally set up in 2018 in a corporate tax-free zone in the United Arab Emirates. (After I publicly identified PACEM North Canada this spring, the company attempted to strip Mills’s name; recent court filings state he fully owns the still-active company.)
While Mills has disclosed some previously omitted entities in recently corrected filings, he still hasn’t reported those foreign entities. He also still hasn’t disclosed his liability for PACEM’s debt.
BLIND TRUST
This year, however, Mills added a new entity that would seem to offer a sheen of ethical discretion: A so-called “blind” trust.
According to PACEM board member and American Bankers Association lobbyist John Kevin McKechnie, Mills created a trust to hold his assets after winning the 2022 election. McKechnie—who told me in an interview that he has run the trust since Mills joined Congress in early 2023—claimed the trust belongs to Mills and contains “all of his holdings,” explaining the intent was to keep Mills’s assets at “arm’s length” while he held public office. A lawyer for PACEM has previously cited this trust to insinuate Mills does not own PACEM.
The problem there is that all of Mills’s congressional disclosures as well as corporate records say Mills does in fact fully own all of PACEM, except for a slice of one company. But none of Mills’s ethics forms—including the new updates—list a trust, except for his filing covering 2024, which he submitted this August. If McKechnie’s timeline is correct, Mills should have reported the trust on earlier disclosures.
“Any asset he has needs to be disclosed, including trusts,” said Kedric Payne, general counsel for ethics at Campaign Legal Center. “If he had the trust before joining Congress, he’d have to disclose it; if he got it approved by the committee, that must also be disclosed. And any income he receives through the trust must be reported as income on his disclosures.”
There’s another wrinkle. Mills’s disclosures say the trust’s name is “CM Blind Trust,” but it seems the name is the only “blind” thing about it. For one, Mills checked the box affirming his trust had not been approved by the Ethics Committee as a “qualified blind trust.” And, as Payne also noted, the disclosures still declare that Mills has “100%” personal ownership of not just the trust, but the PACEM companies listed under the trust—while openly assigning them value ranges.
“Then that’s not a ‘blind’ trust,” Payne pointed out. “It’s not ‘blind’ if you know what’s in it.”
Further, blind trusts are typically designed to help manage securities, such as stocks. A blind trust setup, Payne said, doesn’t make sense for assets like a private company. And the only assets listed in Mills’s trust are his private companies.
“You’d never expect a lawmaker to put a company in a blind trust,” Payne said. “You’d have to convert the company.”
In addition to the trust, Mills has claimed he “divested” from his companies when he entered Congress. But his personal liability for PACEM’s debt indicates Mills wouldn’t be able to sever his financial interests from his company’s, even if he wanted to.
Mills has also continued to collect income from PACEM in office.
His ethics forms state that Mills has been receiving up to $1 million a year in “rent” from PACEM’s Perry, Florida manufacturing plant. But it’s unclear why one company Mills fully owns needs to pay rent to another holding company Mills also fully owns, which holds the property that the first company bought.
(Neither Mills nor PACEM has ever actually paid for the underlying property that generates his circular income: PACEM bought the plant with loaned money, secured those loans with a mortgage on the property, and hasn’t repaid any of it, according to court filings and financial records.)
Ahead of publication, I sent a comment request and questions to PACEM officials. After publication, a lawyer with the company replied, pointing to certain statements in that comment request as “false” and “legally incorrect.” The response didn’t specify which elements were false and didn’t say how or why. One denial involved these rental payments. The underlying property was purchased with borrowed funds, which the property also simultaneously secured; the original mortgages were released on June 2, 2021, the same day PACEM mortgaged the same property to secure Ninepoint loans with a principal value of $8,360,000. That full principal amount remains unpaid, according to Ninepoint’s foreclosure filings in November.
Then, in February 2023, a month into his first term, Mills took out a new $2 million personal loan related to the sale of his Virginia mansion later that year, financial records show. Weeks later, Mills—who hadn’t given money to his campaign since August—made what is still his last campaign loan, for $50,000.
Weeks after that, Mills and Alsaadi separated. By then, PACEM’s Canadian backers had grown impatient. In June, Mills used the new $2 million loan along with proceeds from the house sale to partially repay Ninepoint, according to Fairfax County records. In a new disclosure correction—filed as the Ethics Committee announced it was reviewing his capacity to personally fund his campaign—Mills claimed he earned between $100,000-$1 million in capital gains from the $3.75 million sale. But Mills had sold the home through an LLC at a loss, then immediately repaid more than the sale amount to Ninepoint—$4.2 million—while still owing that extra $2 million.
Mills cleared that $4.2 million with Ninepoint the day PACEM secured a new contract to export grenades to Ukraine, court filings show; he repaid the $2 million personal loan days before PACEM collected the final payment for that shipment.
Federal law requires members and candidates to disclose “liabilities of a business if you are personally liable for the debt.” Lien records and court filings show Mills is still personally liable. In early 2023, Insider reported PACEM owed its Canadian lenders $48 million, a number consistent with Ninepoint investor statements around the time. Today, the debt appears to have increased nearly 40 percent.
Transparency advocates said Mills’s disclosures cut to the heart of democracy, keeping his voters and the public in the dark.
“The public is entitled to that information, in order to detect if there’s any favor-trading or legislating in his self-interest,” Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel at Campaign Legal Center, told me. “With this kind of blurriness, voters lose the ability to detect those things.”
The claims Mills did make on his ethics forms indicate his stakes in PACEM are worth between $2 million and $10 million combined. But even that could be optimistic.
“The company has no value,” one source recently briefed on PACEM’s finances told me.
Mills, however, has been living large off PACEM, collecting potentially millions of dollars, according to his disclosures. He’s spent much of his downtime lavishing a carousel of girlfriends with posh gifts, trips, and nights at the casino, according to public social media posts and private text messages shared with me. Until recently, Mills was also shelling out close to $400,000 a year to rent two luxury properties, including a $20,000-a-month D.C. penthouse. At the same time, Mills has drawn tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds for personal lodging and meal costs, according to House disbursement data.
For PACEM, it hasn’t been so rosy. Court filings show the company started defaulting on its debt almost immediately—in late 2019—and later racked up more than $1 million in IRS liens for unpaid payroll taxes. Today, the company appears dead in the water: In July, PACEM’s lender—Canadian asset management firm Ninepoint Partners—told shareholders it was terminating PACEM’s flailing debt fund. In October, Ninepoint filed to foreclose on PACEM assets, after which PACEM shuttered its only manufacturing facility and furloughed its workforce indefinitely.
One person with knowledge of PACEM’s financial situation told me, “The company has no value.”
Mills hasn’t bought another home. Instead, he has rented beach houses in his district along with the D.C. penthouse where this February Mills admitted “bruising” a girlfriend in a domestic dispute, according to a police report. (The girlfriend later recanted her allegations.) In July, the penthouse owner served Mills an $80,000 eviction lawsuit after missing four months of rent. Mills blamed a broken link in an app and squared up after the story made national news.
Ninepoint pulled the plug on PACEM’s debt fund that same month. On Oct. 30, PACEM told workers the company wasn’t able to pay them, putting the entire plant on open-ended furlough effective immediately.
“They pulled us all into a plant-wide meeting and did it all at once,” one employee told me. “They said the company is struggling financially and this is in effect until further notice when/if the issue is resolved.”
“I don’t think anyone was aware this was coming,” the person continued, adding that colleagues were “disgusted and disappointed.”
“It’s sad, really,” the employee said, noting the coming holiday season. “It’s devastating.”
PACEM still hasn’t told workers about its debt issues, according to two current employees. A Thanksgiving email shared with me blamed a “gap in production orders as customers seeking to purchase our goods complete their deposits and contractual reviews.”
That email came from PACEM’s current top executive, Shannon Doyle, whom Mills hired as chief financial officer in 2020 and who reportedly passed Mills a “bag of cash” at a dinner last year. Doyle had pleaded guilty to investment fraud in 2018; he served an 8-month federal prison sentence in 2022 and has been banned from certain securities trades for life.
“To preserve the viability of PACEM in the long run, the current furlough unfortunately needs to continue,” Doyle wrote in the Nov. 24 email. “Hopefully, the next update will be more positive.”
The day before that email, according to a source with knowledge of the matter, Mills began moving out of his penthouse.