Is it a harmonic convergence? Is the Rep. Corey Mills (R-FL) alleged assault case finally coming into focus? Let me try to explain the moving parts here. Remember back in February, D.C. police went to home of Mills responding to reports that he had assaulted a woman who D.C. publications delicately noted was not his wife. Prosecuting something like this in D.C. is in the hands of the U.S. Attorney for D.C., who, at the time, was Jan. 6 attorney Ed Martin. Through some mix of Martin doing Mills a solid and the D.C. police spoiling the case because of who Mills was, charges were never brought. So, big win for Mills, as D.C. goes. You can’t be charged with a crime in Washington, D.C. if you’re a Republican these days. I don’t make the rules.
Last night, Daily Beast reporter Roger Sollenberger posted on Twitter that Mills is being evicted from his D.C. apartment on which he owes $85,000. The rent is $20,833 a month.
Now, I’ve lived in New York City for 20 years. I’m familiar with high rents. And $21,000 a month is an exceptionally high rent. I genuinely had a hard time understanding what you get for that much money in D.C. I looked up the address and Mills lives in one of the penthouses in a very, very snazzy building on Maryland Avenue in Southwest. I looked at the floor plan for another one of the penthouses that goes for $17,200 a month. And it’s super nice. But it still seemed a little high-priced for what you get. I also looked at a video of Mills’ apartment posted by the building. I think this building is just super luxe — the walls are glass and you have a bird’s eye view of basically every monument in the city from your living room. So much for the mystery of the $21,000 a month apartment.
So now I’m left with knowing that Mills lives in like the nicest apartment in D.C. and also isn’t paying his rent, which is a weird combination. But then I noticed that he stopped paying in March, which is right after the incident with the woman who isn’t his wife. That happened in mid-February.
Connected?
Maybe Mills was so stoked about getting away with the alleged assault that he just decided to stop paying his rent? A guy starts to feel invincible.
But then this afternoon I saw something that seemed to bring everything together. Someone dropped a link to this story from March in Florida Politics. I really didn’t know much about Mills beyond that he was a hardcore Trump guy and the business with the alleged assault. I did learn from the Florida Politics article that Mills’ D.C. girlfriend is an Iranian-American who is the co-founder of something called Iranians for Trump, who lives in the same luxe apartment complex. But no, that’s not the interesting part. The story is about a report prepared by the Office of Congressional Ethics. First, we learn why the pricey apartment. Mills is a big defense contractor. He’s rich. The report raises real questions about whether Mills was still a defense contractor while he was serving in Congress and whether he lied about that. And here we get to the key fact: What Mills did was place these companies under at least the nominal control of his wife, Rana al Saadi, a naturalized American citizen from Iraq.
The Office of Congressional Ethics report was a bit hard for me to follow. But it makes clear that not long after he entered Congress, al Saadi became the public-facing agent for Mills’ companies and the person in apparent control of these companies (see page 19 and following of the report). Mills’ ownership stake also changed. The biggest problem the ethics office found had to do with the possibility that Mills did not disclose one of his defense contracting entities and that the ethics office suspected that all three companies were in fact one consolidated operation. Those points don’t directly concern us. What got my attention was putting his companies and perhaps his ownership stake (that part isn’t clear) under the control of his wife, al Saadi.
Is this what ties everything together?
Mills skated on the alleged assault of the girlfriend. But maybe he didn’t skate with his wife, to whom he turned over ownership of his defense contractor companies? Is that why he stopped paying his rent? His wife cut him off? Even if he didn’t assign her ownership, giving her control of the companies might have been enough to disrupt the money spigot.
This is admittedly speculative. But I think you need an explanation when a member of Congress suddenly stops paying rent on his $21,000 a month apartment. There is a potential problem with this theory. In this May article in The Daily Mail — which is about a whole other story about claims in The Blaze that Mills converted to Islam to be married by a radical cleric at a D.C. mosque — he says that he and his wife have been getting divorced for two and a half years.
If that’s true it kind of throws a wrench in my rent theory. That would mean he was getting divorced long before the alleged assault incident. But is it true? I’m not sure Mills is the most credible guy. And it doesn’t completely make sense that you’d give possession of all your businesses to your estranged wife who you’re getting divorced from, unless things are like super super amicable. And if you put the timelines together, that is what happened.
In any case, for now I’m going to go with: these two stories may indeed be connected.