‘George Santos With a Gun’: The Untold Story of Cory Mills, A Mercenary In Congress
The Florida Republican has tried to leverage his legislative role to the benefit of his arms business. With that business now in foreclosure proceedings, Mills has little to show for it.
In September, Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) took the witness stand in a Columbia County, Florida, courthouse, to persuade a judge, in front of a roomful of press, to deny a restraining order request from an ex-girlfriend accusing Mills of cyberstalking and threats of revenge porn.
“You’re also married, right?” the ex-girlfriend’s attorney asked, turning to a central fact in the case: The two-term Florida Republican had lied to this girlfriend a year ago when he promised her that he and his wife had divorced. Mills had already conceded that was not true when he made the promise and, he told the court, still was not true.
“When—if ever—have your divorce proceedings been filed?” the lawyer asked.
“They still have not filed,” Mills replied.
But they had been filed. His wife submitted her complaint to a Virginia judge this July, tried but failed to seal the case, and then Mills filed his 10-page answer and counterclaim the next month.
The attorney approached Mills on the stand and handed him his divorce proceedings in a packet.
“Mr. Mills, go ahead and take a look through that,” she said. “Let me know that you’re ready for a question by looking up, please.”
The room waited while Mills flipped wordlessly through the packet, head down, page by page, for more than 3 minutes.
“You know what under oath is—you swear to tell the truth, right?” the attorney later asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mills said.
Cory Mills is not as famous as George Santos. Maybe he should be.
Mills, a former Army medic turned Beltway defense contractor, has until very recently drawn little national attention. Unlike Santos, his former colleague in the House of Representatives, Mills isn’t a fixture of primetime news or late-night comedy. And unlike Santos, Mills, who was elected at the same time as Santos, in 2022, has remained in Congress and free from criminal charges.
However, according to dozens of sources close to Mills, Mills appears to have misrepresented himself to a degree that is comparable to his former colleague. And the reality is, Mills’s case carries far greater significance and, according to sources as well as public and internal documents, far more startling implications of potential corruption.
As one Capitol Hill Republican described Mills to me, “George Santos with a gun.”
“He lies like he actually believes what he’s saying,” a former business associate remarked.
“He’s a pathological liar through and through. He lies for no obvious reason and seems to enjoy making enemies with his colleagues unnecessarily,” a Republican member of Congress told me. “No core beliefs, no core principles.”
This is the first in a series of in-depth reports based on my Mills investigation. Over the last nine months, I’ve spoken with hundreds of sources about Mills, and have reviewed thousands of pages of business records, court filings, financial statements, and other public and internal documents that demonstrate what legal and ethics experts describe as serious conflicts between Mills’s congressional, personal, and corporate interests. At the center of those issues is the weapons manufacturing and security contracting company Mills co-founded with his wife in 2014, “PACEM.”
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. I’ve updated the piece throughout to make PACEM’s denials from that response as clear as I can.
I’ll delve into more detail in future installments, but the findings, some of which I’ll mention in my overview today, include:
PACEM’s and Mills’s ongoing foreign entanglements have gone unreported—including weapons exports—while Mills sits on House Armed Services and House Foreign Affairs and chairs a subcommittee that exercises direct oversight of his own industry.
PACEM appears to have been illegally exporting weapons as Mills serves in Congress.
Mills has personally guaranteed tens of millions in PACEM debt to a foreign lender, without disclosing it to Congress, as required by law. PACEM’s foreign corporate loans appear tied to $2 million Mills “personally” gave his congressional campaign.
PACEM hasn’t repaid its debts—the company owes $66 million, and it recently shut down operations and stopped paying workers amid a foreclosure claim. At the same time, Mills has been spending lavishly on himself and romantic interests.
Mills appears to have repeatedly failed to disclose information to Congress required by law—including holding companies, foreign entities, and a nonprofit.
Mills’s fully-owned company has been engaged in multiple federal lawsuits while he has held office, incurring an $8 million breach of contract consent judgment this summer for Ukraine weapons shipments.
Mills, who is married but now divorcing, hired sex workers during a covert Afghanistan mission and has juggled several girlfriends at once while in Congress, including alleged relationships with other members. Multiple ex-girlfriends and other people who have been close to Mills claim he is an emotionally abusive “psychopath” who has frightened them.
Mills has allegedly tried to fistfight other Republican members of Congress, and lied about his party stature to bully other GOP candidates out of primaries that an alleged romantic interest was running in.
Mills has lied about his religious history, denying his conversion to Islam in 2014 when he married his current wife.
PACEM works with secretive arms brokers, including in offshore mercenary and laundering hubs, and its chief legal officer registered as a foreign agent for a warlord proxy government while Mills served in Congress.
PACEM has extensive ties to private military company Blackwater and its founder Erik Prince, partnering on Ukraine exports with Prince and a former Ukrainian lawmaker who once served as a Putin-Trump backchannel.
Mills has taken frequent trips to the Middle East in Congress, including at least three visits this year, but he has only filed one gift travel report with ethics officials. The most recent trip was a solo visit to Syria in September, but there is still no disclosure from Mills revealing the itinerary or funding.
Updates:
PACEM’s response appeared to deny that the company owes $66 million. Last month, PACEM’s lender filed court claims stating that PACEM owes $66,362,166.80 in combined outstanding loans and unpaid interest.
PACEM denied that the company has been exporting arms illegally. Specialists in national security and export control law told me federal statutes would prohibit a company owned by a sitting member of Congress from obtaining government authorization to export weapons, since members are statutorily prohibited from contracting with the federal government. As the Office of Congressional Conduct found earlier this year, Mills’s self-declared full ownership of the exporting entity—PACEM Defense LLC—would prohibit him and the entity from contracting with the federal government.
PACEM’s denials also addressed the claim that its chief legal officer registered as a foreign agent for a warlord proxy government. Justice Department records show that the PACEM official filed a foreign agent short-form registration as subcontractor for the Libyan Parliament in 2023, reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars in paid work. The Maryland address listed for the Libyan Parliament in those filings matches a personal home address for the PACEM lawyer. Libya has had a bitterly divided government for years, and the United States doesn’t officially recognize the branch represented in the filings, which governs the eastern part of the country and is widely understood as a proxy for Libyan Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s tribal faction.
PACEM denied the characterization of its export partnership with a Prince and the former Ukrainian lawmaker. Court filings show PACEM listed AirTrans LLC as a shipping agent for grenades PACEM sold to the Ukrainian government in 2024. AirTrans LLC was founded by Andrii Artemenko, who told TIME Magazine that AirTrans was officially folded into Prince’s Frontier Resource Group in 2015. Artemenko—who once served as a pro-Russia backchannel to President Donald Trump—also served as PACEM’s point person in Ukraine dealings, a person with direct knowledge of the arrangement told me.
On one hand it’s hard to get a true sense of Mills from what’s in the public record. However, as the omissions and misdirections pile up, the absences themselves start to seem like evidence of a larger truth.
Today, the House Ethics Committee is trying to get to that truth, formally announcing an investigation last month. Ethics is acting on a referral from the Office of Congressional Conduct, a nonpartisan congressional investigative body which this spring found Mills had likely broken federal contracting and campaign finance laws—though Ethics has broadened that scope to include potential misuse of official resources, leveraging his office to curry favors, unreported gifts on overseas trips, and “dating violence” allegations adjudicated in the restraining order a Florida judge awarded his ex-girlfriend in October.
At the center of both probes is the roughly $2 million in “personal loans” Mills gave his 2022 congressional campaign. But 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.
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 statements. Mills has denied these allegations.
The amount of PACEM’s debt is existential. Today, PACEM owes a whopping $66 million, according to recent court filings. That’s anywhere between six and 33 times what Mills’s disclosures say the company is worth. (PACEM appears to deny the $66 million claim.)
But there’s more mystery to these loans. That’s because Mills has never disclosed the 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 last month, the day after Ethics publicly announced its probe. His disclosures also appear to have omitted his affiliation with a number of other PACEM entities, including foreign entities in Canada and Pakistan, as well as a branch Mills set up in a corporate tax-free zone in the United Arab Emirates.
After his election to Congress, Mills has continued to personally collect hundreds of thousands of dollars, potentially millions, in “rent” from PACEM, according to his financial disclosures. He has also received “sacks of cash” of as much as $100,000, I reported this summer, and has been paying close to $400,000 a year to rent two luxury properties, including a D.C. penthouse.
Update: PACEM’s reply denied aspects of the company’s payments to Mills; all of his financial disclosures have claimed between $100,000 and $1 million in annual “rent” payments from PACEM.
This summer, PACEM’s lender—Canadian asset management firm Ninepoint Partners—told investors it was terminating PACEM’s debt fund. In October, Ninepoint filed a legal claim against that debt in Taylor County, Florida, then moved to foreclose on the company’s only factory in Perry. On Oct. 30, PACEM abruptly halted work and stopped paying workers, with no advance notice. PACEM has still never told those workers about its debt issues, the foreclosure, or Ninepoint’s legal claims, according to current and former employees and recent internal communications from its current CEO, Shannon Doyle—who first appeared on corporate statements in 2020 after pleading guilty to unrelated federal investment fraud charges, serving an 8-month prison sentence in 2022.
Update: PACEM’s reply denied statements about Doyle’s record. Doyle first appears on PACEM Defense’s annual corporate statements in 2020, but signed another PACEM entity document as treasurer on Nov. 16, 2018. That’s three days after Doyle pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with what the DOJ called a “scheme to defraud” investors in a private business, federal records show. In 2021, court records show, Doyle was sentenced to eight months in prison. Bureau of Prison records show Doyle was released in August 2022, and in 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission fined Doyle and barred him from certain securities activity. (Financial records show Doyle founded the company at the center of that scheme with Dale Rasmussen, who joined the PACEM advisory board in August 2018.) Mills has told people that Doyle also handles his personal financial matters, including disclosure paperwork, according to two people with direct knowledge.
Mills continued to own PACEM in Congress, according to financial and business records and his own ethics disclosures, which report full ownership of all but a small slice of the business. This spring, investigators with the Office of Congressional Conduct found that Mills’s self-reported full ownership means PACEM’s contracts with the federal government are likely illegal. The House Ethics Committee is currently scrutinizing those contracts in its own investigation, which it formally announced last month.
By the same token, however, PACEM also appears to have been illegally exporting weapons. The lion’s share of PACEM’s publicly known revenue doesn’t come from federal contracts, but from exports. And court records show that PACEM has privately shipped lethal munitions—including to Ukraine—while Mills has sat on both the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees. Legal and industry experts, citing federal statutes, told me that, as with PACEM’s government contracts, Mills’s ownership means those exports are likely illegal in the first place.
(A lawyer for PACEM has previously argued that Mills put his ownership in a blind trust. That trust, however, doesn’t seem to be “blind” at all, with Mills still publicly disclosing his full ownership, along with the trust’s individual assets and their stated values.)
Update: PACEM’s denials appeared to apply to the way the blind trust ownership was characterized.
The export arrangements are further complicated by the longstanding ties that Mills and PACEM have to mercenary groups and shadowy international operators—including in notorious offshore hubs like Malta and Dubai.
But Mills’s misdirections aren’t limited to his business and financial lives. According to people close to Mills and a review of public and private documents, Mills appears to have misrepresented, misled, or lied about almost every dimension of his lived experience—his resume, his education, his military service and awards, his charitable giving, even his personal religious history. (Mills converted to Islam to marry his second wife, with the marriage taking place at a hardline D.C.-area mosque, according to the wedding certificate, a person with direct knowledge of the events, and three sources who said Mills told friends at the time; Mills has denied converting and variously claims Catholic and Protestant affiliations.)
Mills’s romantic, family, and personal lives also harbor secrets, as I first reported in August, with a group of ex-girlfriends labeling Mills a potentially violent “psychopath” who frightened them. In October, a Florida judge granted one of those exes a restraining order against Mills, citing cyberstalking, revenge porn, and “dating violence.” In February, Mills—who is still married—admitted to Washington, D.C., police that a physical altercation he had with a different girlfriend was “severe enough to cause bruising,” according to a police report obtained by NBC4. The girlfriend later recanted the allegations and Mills now denies these events.
Mills has tried to fistfight multiple GOP colleagues, according to five people with knowledge of the events, and three congressional sources said he was thrown out of an establishment during an overseas congressional delegation after an allegedly drunken brawl. A 2023 police report concerning Mills in Prince George’s County, Maryland, involves a “handgun pointing” incident, according to correspondence with a law enforcement official who reviewed the report. I also obtained a search warrant request in Washington, D.C., from this February showing that police had reason to believe Mills kept an unregistered firearm and ammunition in his penthouse condo; it’s unclear if the warrant was ever approved.
Congress removed Santos from office. But Mills, who voted to keep Santos around, was seen last July in the Republican National Convention’s presidential V.I.P. box alongside Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. Months later, he won re-election by 13 points and now chairs the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Intelligence.
That subcommittee also happens to exercise direct oversight of his own company’s weapons exports. Only two of those deals while Mills has held office are public, however, and that’s only because of exhibits in a lawsuit PACEM agreed to pay millions of dollars to resolve this summer. Both deals were in the works as Mills was arguing in committee that Congress should have even less scrutiny over private commercial arms sales.
I’ve asked Mills a number of times about his finances and business, but he’s never provided answers. Elsewhere, Mills has argued that he has established proper distance from PACEM, saying he “divested” from the company on entering office and put his ownership in a self-declared “blind” trust. However, legal experts note that corporate and financial records—and Mills’s own congressional disclosures—contradict those claims and show he still owns the company. Personal liability for PACEM’s debt would also seem to make it impossible for Mills to meaningfully separate his personal financial interests from the company.
Even PACEM’s workers seem to be in the dark. Current and former employees, some at the executive level, who were involved with the company’s State Department-approved exports also told me they’re unaware of other sides of the business. For instance, employees, including at the executive level, said they weren’t aware of PACEM’s subrosa agreement to sell a wide range of live ammunition manufactured by Blackwater, the private military company founded by Erik Prince. PACEM sells Blackwater bullets through a “strategic partnership” with a small offshore broker with a mercenary past incorporated on the island nation of Malta. (PACEM—whose chief legal officer was Blackwater’s chief operations officer from 2005-2009—also partnered with Prince and a notorious former Ukrainian lawmaker to export millions of dollars in grenades last year, listing a Ukrainian firm currently under state scrutiny for corruption, court records show.)
PACEM may seem to have some inside advantages, but despite Mills’s sporadic attempts to push a legislative agenda that would coincidentally benefit his business, however, the struggling company has struggled further. Today, PACEM’s decade-long, debt-dependent run appears dead in the water.
Mills, meanwhile, has been torching money. He has spent much of his downtime from Congress lavishing girlfriends with posh gifts, trips, and nights at the casino, according to social media posts and private text messages shared with me. He flexes designer clothes, private helicopter flights, and, reportedly, those “sacks of cash.” For the last two years, Mills, who doesn’t own a home, has flushed $400,000 annually into rental payments on two luxury properties—all while claiming to give his full congressional salary to charity without providing evidence to bear it out.
Those rentals include the D.C. penthouse where Mills was reported to police in February. In July, the penthouse owner served Mills an $80,000 eviction lawsuit after he missed four straight months of rent. He blamed a broken link in his RentCafe payment app and squared up after the story made national news. He began moving out of that condo this week, according to a person with knowledge of the matter and other evidence shared with me.
Days before the eviction suit was filed, Ninepoint notified shareholders it was finally pulling the plug on PACEM’s debt fund, promising investors that Ninepoint would seek to recoup the losses. Weeks after the Ninepoint announcement, Mills’s wife filed for divorce in Fairfax County, Virginia. The next month, one of his ex-girlfriends asked a judge in Columbia County, Florida, for the restraining order.
Quite a year.
These claims may at first come as a surprise to supporters who know and enjoy Mills as a punchy, declarative MAGA malapropist frequently seen laying into his feckless Democratic rivals on conservative cable news and podcasts. Those audiences were introduced to Mills on Fox News as a war hero—the candidate who risked his life to save American citizens stranded amid the chaotic and deadly evacuation from Afghanistan in 2021.
That is a heroic story, at least to hear Mills tell it. Last month, however, I broke the news that Mills appears to have lied in his public statements about that rescue, with reckless behavior that potentially endangered the team he was with—including hiring sex workers multiple times while the team was planning the operation from a Tbilisi, Georgia, hotel.
“It was every night,” one source present for the events told me.
The mission made Mills a MAGA star and Fox News darling, and he rarely misses an opportunity to mention it. But Mills, who drove an Army ambulance in Iraq, is now under assault for repeatedly lying about his military record, including about a Bronze Star and alleged injuries his campaign website falsely says happened “while serving abroad.” (The bio also still falsely says Mills has “nearly 7-years of service in Iraq”; his Army personnel file says six months, tops.)
Mills’s sexual exploits—some including other members—are a poorly kept secret in GOP circles on the Hill.
People with knowledge of Mills’s behavior, including ex-girlfriends, emphasize that he uses sexual relationships in a predatory way that could violate federal standards of conduct—exercising control over both men and women, which, these sources said, Mills pairs with the tacit but understood influence of his office.
One recent relationship involves a woman in Republican politics who graduated high school in 2022—the same year voters sent Mills to Congress. This woman, who began dating Mills in 2023, has confided in people close to her that the experience was disillusioning and exploitative.
I previously reported that Mills has propositioned multiple girlfriends with group sex while in Congress, at least once while acknowledging the woman already made her objections clear. Mills also sent a woman to a male friend’s home—a friend who hadn’t previously met the woman—to have sex, I reported; the friend described the experience as demeaning and compared it to “sex slavery.”
Still, the biggest dirty secret about Mills on Capitol Hill is that plenty of Republicans know more than enough about him.
“I can’t believe leadership has let it go on this long. He needs to be thrown off those committees and out of Congress,” one GOP member told me, describing Mills as “a national security threat.”
Three other Republican members described Mills as a “national security threat” in conversations. Another GOP member called him a “fraud.”
“He doesn’t have many friends here,” a senior Republican staffer observed, adding that Mills is widely known as a liar and “hothead.”
“If you spend more than a few days with him, you begin to realize something’s not right,” another Republican member said.
The Pentagon has also been investigating. Last year, a loose group of veterans submitted public records inquiries and complaints to the Army, alleging dishonesty in Mills’s military record. (His campaign website falsely says Mills has “nearly 7-years of service in Iraq”; military records say four months.) A person recently briefed on the matter said the Pentagon has launched multiple inquiries into Mills’s record, including his claims to a Bronze Star.
One of those veterans, former member of the 82nd Airborne Bobby Oller, told me that Mills “stole the valor and honor of men whose sacrifices he never earned,” wearing their legacy “as a political costume to advance himself.”
Mills has even run afoul of the Republican Party recently. Claiming to speak as the director of recruiting for the National Republican Congressional Committee—a title held by Rep. Brian Jack (R-GA)—Mills tried to bully GOP candidates out of both primary races that an alleged romantic interest, one-time Texas Rep. Mayra Flores, has entered this year, according to text messages and two people familiar with the threats.
After discussing the threats with Mills, an NRCC official told me Mills was “no longer involved in recruitment,” noting “that was his decision so he could focus on his official duties.” The official noted the NRCC’s longstanding policy not to engage in primaries.
In that same Florida courtroom last month, Mills’s own counsel suggested it would be crazy to think a sitting congressman would lord revenge porn over an ex or threaten to beat up her new boyfriend, asking Mills what the consequences for that kind of behavior would be.
“You’re talking about giving up my entire career, and what I’ve done for serving this country in uniform, and then now in Congress,” Mills said. “For what?”