D.C. police were about to arrest Rep. Cory Mills (R-Florida) after a woman accused him of assault last year, but a lieutenant ordered them not to when she changed her account after appearing to talk to the congressman, according to body-camera footage and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The next day, police reversed course, asking then-interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, an appointee of President Donald Trump, to sign off on a warrant to arrest Mills, a request the prosecutor denied. The Feb. 19, 2025 incident is part of a broad House Ethics Committee investigation into Mills, now seeking a third term with Trump’s endorsement.
The body-camera footage and documents show that Richard Mazloom, the police officer who first responded to the accuser’s 911 call, disagreed with his superior’s decision to classify the incident as a “family disturbance” after the woman recanted and said Mills had not assaulted her.
“Unfortunately, I have bosses that are making this into a family disturbance — a domestic disturbance — instead of an actual domestic assault,” Mazloom told the alleged victim, according to the body-camera footage that a judge ordered released to The Post last month.
Before changing her account, the woman had shown Mazloom bruises on her arms and marks on her face, the body-camera footage shows. Tearful, she told the officer that Mills had harmed her during an argument and forcibly removed her from his Southwest Washington penthouse apartment, according to the footage.
“I just wanted to make record of this because I don’t want it to happen to anyone else,” the woman told Mazloom when he interviewed her at a hotel bar near the congressman’s apartment more than six hours after the 4:30 a.m. altercation. Mazloom’s body-camera footage shows her sipping what she later said was an alcoholic beverage.
Soon after, with Mazloom’s body camera still recording, the woman could be heard talking on her phone. She told Mazloom that “he wants me to say” that the marks on her body “were from our vacation and that I bruise easily.” Mazloom later told fellow officers that he understood that the person she had been speaking to on phone was the congressman, according to the footage.
Mills and the woman, whom The Post is not identifying because she had alleged to be the victim of domestic abuse, had just returned from a trip to Dubai where, in separate conversations with police, they both said she had suffered bruises while riding a camel.
The prospect of an arrest seemed imminent enough at one point that the investigators agreed to summon a transport vehicle to take the congressman to a station house to face charges, the body-camera video shows.
In domestic violence cases, D.C.’s criminal code states that a police officer, even if they did not witness the alleged incident, “shall arrest a person” if “probable cause” exists that the individual “committed an intrafamily offense that resulted in physical injury.”
The footage and documents add new details to the previously reported incident at a moment when some members of Congress are facing intense scrutiny over alleged misconduct against women. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) earlier this week resigned from his House seat and withdrew from the California gubernatorial race after two women accused him of sexual assault and two others said he harassed them. Swalwell has denied the allegations. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) also resigned after it was revealed he had an affair with a staffer who later killed herself. Gonzales has acknowledged the relationship.
Mills, in a text exchange with The Post earlier this month, described as “patently false” the woman’s initial claim that he had assaulted her. “I’m not commenting on any more of this as there was no crime committed or anything left to say,” wrote Mills, whose district includes the area between Orlando and Daytona Beach and who serves on the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees.
The woman declined to comment. A police spokesman on Friday declined to comment. Mazloom and Lt. Seth Anderson, the highest-ranking police official who responded to the incident that day, did not respond to requests for comment.
Mills, 45, has been the focus of recent ethics investigationsand legal challenges. Along with the D.C. case involving the woman, the House is probing whether Mills improperly accepted gifts and violated campaign finance laws in 2022 and 2024. In addition, a Florida judge in 2025 granted a protective order to another woman with whom Mills was involved after she alleged he threatened to disseminate sexually explicit photos and videos of her and said he would harm her future boyfriends. He has denied the charges in a statement and said they were intended to damage him politically.
The D.C. apartment that was the focus of the 911 call in February 2025 is a luxury high-rise where the landlord last year filed a lawsuit accusing the congressman of failing to pay $85,000 in rent. Mills, in social media posts at the time, explained that a technical glitch in an online portal prevented him from submitting $20,833-a-month rental payments. Mills has said he paid the back rent and the suit was dropped.
The House ethics investigation into Mills began last November after Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) lobbied colleagues to censure the congressman, in part because of the assault allegation against him in D.C.
The body-camera footage from February 2025 shows the congressman trying to make small talk with the officers as they questioned him later that day in a lounge on the first floor of his apartment building. At one point, according to the footage and an affidavit seeking an arrest warrant, Mills told the officers he feared that the allegations against him would be “politicized because of my party.”
“It will be weaponized,” said the congressman, in a T-shirt and baseball cap as he sat in an easy chair near a lit fireplace. “This is going to drag me through a quagmire.”
At another point, while claiming police had no evidence he had assaulted the woman, Mills said he wanted to call then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, and appeared to reach for his phone, angering Mazloom, who was conducting the interview.
“I stepped toward you once, if I do it again it will be to put you in handcuffs,” Mazloom said. “If I say don’t make a phone call, just don’t do it.”
The footage shows that the team of investigators responding to the scene, including several officers, two sergeants and the lieutenant, knew that Mills is a congressman.
At one point, as he sought Mills’s cooperation while explaining why he would have to arrest him, Mazloom told the congressman he was “willing to make sure that there’s some modicum of extra treatment here, a little VIP service when it comes to what we have to do.”
“I’m trying to offer you gold here,” Mazloom said, according to the footage, promising to transport him to a police facility in the front seat of his own cruiser “so there’s almost no evidence what’s happening” and to ensure it’s “a hundred percent a private affair, as much as I can.”
Mazloom had interviewed the accuser before noon that day after she called 911 to report “an assault” and that “a firearm was used during” their altercation, according to the police arrest affidavit. When a police officer later asked about a weapon, Mills said he did not have a gun inside his home, the footage shows.
The woman had “noticeable injuries” to the lower part of her right eye and showed Mazloom “injures/bruises to her arms consistent with signs of a physical assault,” according to the affidavit.
The woman told Mazloom that the man who attacked her was “a prominent person” who “has suddenly become very abusive,” according to the body-camera footage. She also said, “I don’t want to get him in trouble.”
Mazloom explained that the law required him to “document that we’re here and I have to knock on his door” and “hear his side of the story” and said he could help her retrieve whatever belongings she had left behind in the apartment.
After persuading the woman to identify the congressman and his apartment number, Mazloom, along with another officer, then walked the short distance to the building and knocked on his door.
“Mr. Mills!” Mazloom shouted after there was no answer. “D.C. police department! Open the door! Mr. Cory Mills!”
No one answered.
The officers returned downstairs, where Mazloom conferred with Mills’s chief of staff, telling her that without the congressman’s account the alleged victim “has evidence of an assault.”
It was around then that Mazloom could hear the woman speaking on her phone with a person the officer assumed was Mills, according to the body-camera footage. After hanging up, the woman told Mazloom that she was instructed to explain that her bruises “were from our vacation” and that “I bruise easily.”
“I do bruise easily,” she said. “I don’t know what that changes.”
“It doesn’t change anything,” Mazloom said, according to the footage. “My camera has been running the whole time, okay? It caught your conversation where you said, ‘What do you want me to say?’ You just told me, ‘He wants me to say this.’”
“Right,” she said.
“Which blatantly contradicts what you told me in the lobby,” Mazloom is heard saying in the recording, “and we already know the truth.”
The congressman came to the lobby soon after and led the officers into a lounge where they closed the door. Mills told Mazloom that the woman had “overreacted” and that “she was just upset because of another woman, I was upset because of another man and we raised our voices together,” the video shows.
“I don’t understand how raising your voice is in some way a domestic incident,” the congressman told Mazloom.
As Mazloom explained the legal procedure police are required to follow when investigating allegations of domestic violence, two more officers arrived. Mazloom became impatient when the congressman stood up and walked over to shake the officers’ hands.
“My tone is about to change with you, don’t interrupt me again,” Mazloom said, ordering the congressman to “sit down.”
“Sir, there’s no reason to be disrespectful,” Mills said.
“You are a suspect right now and I’ve been sugarcoating it for your benefit,” Mazloom said. Moments later, the officer added: “Let me drop this bomb. By law, I have to take you to the station, okay?”
“Even though I haven’t put my hands on anyone?” Mills asked. The congressman, in the course of his conversation with the officers, said that they had “zero proof that I have ever physically harmed this woman.”
The woman’s bruises and the fact that she was upset, Mazloom explained, didn’t allow him “as a police officer in this city to just say, ah maybe she’s lying.”
At one point, the woman entered the room, seeking an “update,” but the officers ordered her to return to the lobby, where a sergeant asked her what happened between her and the congressman and she gave a different account than she had given Mazloom, according to the footage.
“We got into a bad argument this morning and it got physical,” she told the sergeant in the video. “Both of us put our hands on each other and I called the police.”
When the sergeant asked how she sustained her injuries, she said “I’m not exactly sure, like, what happened.”
“Who put their hands on who first?” the sergeant asked.
“I don’t remember,” she replied.
In a separate conversation with another sergeant, after she had backed away from her allegations, the woman said she had told Mazloom about her injuries earlier that day “under duress,” according to the body-camera footage.
“I had been drinking alcohol and there is footage of me drinking the alcohol as I was saying that statement so that is not a statement that can be used,” she said.
“Unfortunately, you’re not making that decision,” the sergeant said.
Anderson, the lieutenant who was serving as the watch commander that day, eventually arrived and learned from his subordinates that the woman was recanting.
“I don’t see the value of making an arrest on simple assault if we have a complainant who’s working against us,” Anderson said as he and the officers discussed how to proceed, according to the footage.
He told the officers he was leaning toward classifying the case as a family disturbance, which would mean not arresting Mills. A factor influencing his thinking, the lieutenant said, was that he did not see “significant bruising” on the woman’s face, though he acknowledged that he had not seen her arms.
“If she had a big old bruise on her face, okay no problem,” Anderson said.
At Mazloom’s request , the woman showed the lieutenant the marks on her arms. She told the officers that one mark was from eczema and another was from “camel riding in Dubai.”
“So when you told me they were from an assault earlier you were mistaken?” Mazloom asked her in front of the lieutenant.
“Yes,” she said.
After the woman walked away, the lieutenant’s phone rang and he explained to an unidentified caller his decision to classify the incident as a family disturbance, the footage shows.
It was around then that Mazloom could hear the woman speaking on her phone with a person the officer assumed was Mills, according to the body-camera footage. After hanging up, the woman told Mazloom that she was instructed to explain that her bruises “were from our vacation” and that “I bruise easily.”
“Initially there were some statements made but our witness is entirely recanting everything and has alternative explanations that are equally unprovable,” the lieutenant said, a decision that would be reversed the following day when the department sent an arrest warrant to Martin’s office.
Before leaving the scene, Mazloom told the woman that “nobody is shaming” her for changing her story. “If you ever have to call again, please know we will advocate for you just as strongly as we did today,” the officer said. “I hope you don’t have to call again.”
Nate Jones and Kadia Goba contributed to this report.
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