Newly released body camera footage showing a Florida Republican congressman attempting to call then-Attorney General Pam Bondi while being questioned by Washington police over an alleged assault has significantly widened the scrutiny on one of the more troubled figures currently serving in the House of Representatives.
The footage, obtained and published by The Washington Post from a February 2025 incident, shows officers responding to a call from a woman who accused Representative Cory Mills of physically assaulting her at a Washington hotel bar, where she appeared to the arriving officers to be in distress and showed them bruises on her arms and marks on her face.
In the footage, as officers questioned Mills directly about the incident, the Republican lawmaker reached for his phone and stated that he wanted to call Bondi — a move that prompted an officer named Richard Mazloom to warn him directly: “I stepped toward you once; if I do it again it will be to put you in handcuffs. If I say don’t make a call, just don’t do it.”
Mills had already expressed awareness of the political dimension of the situation before reaching for his phone, telling officers he feared the allegations would be “politicized because of my party,” according to both the footage and an affidavit prepared as part of an arrest warrant application. “It will be weaponized,” he said. “This is going to drag me through a quagmire.”
Shortly after the tense exchange with officers, the woman who had made the original complaint returned and told police she had been mistaken about the assault, a reversal that the footage shows occurred after she received a phone call from Mills while officers were still on scene.
The senior officer present moved to reclassify the incident as a domestic disturbance rather than an assault, and no arrest was made on that evening in February 2025.
This specific incident is one thread in a substantially larger House Ethics Committee investigation into Mills that commenced in November, triggered by allegations from his ex-girlfriend that he had threatened to blackmail her using sexually explicit images and threatened violence against future romantic partners — a separate set of accusations not linked to the woman in the hotel bar footage.
The Post did not identify the woman shown in the body camera footage, and the report did not confirm whether she and the ex-girlfriend who filed the blackmail allegations are the same person.
The disclosure lands in a Congress that has been rocked by a separate wave of scandal: Republican Representative Tony Gonzalez and Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell both formally resigned this month after facing House investigations into sexual assault allegations against each of them, leaving the body already depleted in numbers and credibility.
For Mills, the publication of body camera footage showing him invoking the attorney general’s name during a police investigation adds a dimension that goes beyond personal conduct into questions about whether elected officials attempt to use proximity to executive power as a shield against routine law enforcement.
