Covering Up Crimes?

An alleged assault by a Congressmember, multiple versions of the official police report, and an unsigned warrant for an arrest raise some troubling questions.

Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) answers questions from reporters. Photo courtesy of Politico.

It reads like something out of Law & Order. Dum-dum!

Police arrived at a D.C. luxury penthouse apartment last Wednesday night over a reported assault. A 27-year old woman, physically shaking and scared when the police arrived, had reported the incident. She showed them bruises and identified her significant other as the perpetrator.

That man is GOP Rep. Cory Mills, who represents an area north of Orlando in Florida. The unnamed woman, who is not Mills’s wife, said Mills has been with her romantically for over a year.

Mills’s office is downplaying the incident, calling it a “private matter” and saying Rep. Mills “vehemently denies any wrongdoing whatsoever.” The reported victim has changed her tune and is now claiming there was “no physical abuse involved” and that the bruises were from “medical conditions and activities from an overseas trip.”

She frankly sounds like one of Pete Hegseth’s spouses.

This is all scandal enough, given that the last thing the Republicans need now is to lose one more seat in their razor thin majority. In years past, a mistress, paired with an arrest warrant for physically assaulting her, would be a career ender. But that’s unlikely today given how far the GOP has fallen.

Yet this story still has life and may be bigger than the incident that spawned it. As they say, the cover up is usually worse than the crime.

Why three different police reports?

If you can believe it, there are now three different versions of the police report that NBC News has viewed.

The first says that, over the phone, the woman let officers hear Mills instruct her to lie about the origin of her injuries. When the police arrived, she showed them fresh bruises on her arm.

Mills later made contact with the police and admitted to them that the situation had escalated from a verbal altercation to a physical one severe enough to cause bruising.

That admission is enough probable cause for an arrest, and D.C. law is clear that officers shall arrest a suspect if there is probable cause to believe an intrafamily offense resulting in physical injury has occurred.

But when the responding officer went to arrest Mills, the woman recanted, including changing her story about where the bruises came from. A later statement by her said that she had called the cops while in a state of being “severely jet-lagged and sleep-deprived.”

Uh huh.

A second version of the police report then emerged, saying only that officers responded to a “family disturbance” and there was no probable cause for arrest—despite there being an admission by Mills and physical evidence of bruising.

After NBC News reached out to the police department for comment, a third version of the official police report appeared Thursday night, saying only that officers responded to a report of an assault and that they are investigating it.

These changes to the report raise important questions. Who is directing that changes be made? Why was there no arrest in the first place? And why was it reclassified in the second report from an “assault” to a “family disturbance”—then back to an assault in the third version of report only after a press inquiry?

Is Congressman Mills getting special treatment?

The story continues to dog the congressman. Politico reported Monday on Mills’s denials: “Both myself and the other individual said that what they’re claiming took place never took place and that’s been reported multiple times,” Mills told reporters. “That’s why the prosecutor, [when] MPD tried to even push it forward, denied prosecution or any follow up.”

Did the U.S. Attorney act improperly?

A warrant for Congressman Mills’s arrest was forwarded to the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. on Friday. That office handles both local and federal crimes in Washington D.C. But to date, the arrest warrant has remained unsigned. Instead, that office sent it back to the police for further investigation.

It’s not unusual for an arrest warrant to bounce between the police and the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. while a case is being investigated. But this one merits extra attention, not only because of the strength of the case against a sitting U.S. representative, including his admission to the police of the assault and physical bruising to support it, but also because of who may be protecting Mills at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C.

Trump’s newly picked top attorney there is Ed Martin, who is a hard core MAGA extremist. Back in 2020, he was involved with “Stop the Steal” and took his cues from radical election denier Ali Alexander:

After being installed in 2025, Martin quickly sucked up to Elon Musk and issued vague threats against anyone who identified members of the DOGE teams who were hacking into our federal computer systems.

Martin warned that “certain individuals and/or groups have committed acts that appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees.”

Martin also threatened Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) with an investigation for warning back in (checks notes) March of 2020 that Supreme Court Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh had released a “whirlwind” and would “pay a price.” Schumer had added, “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Martin called these words by Schumer “threats against public officials” that his office takes “very seriously” and launched an official inquiry.

Recently, Martin also threatened Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) with an investigation for saying the American people “want us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight” during a live interview on CNN. He noted that Rep. Garcia had called Elon Musk “a dick” and that this sounded “to some” like a threat upon Musk.

And just yesterday, Martin released a statement against the Associated Press, stating that his office was “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers” and would be “vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America First.” The Justice Department are not Trump’s lawyers, of course. Rather, they serve the people. Martin is grandstanding to win Trump’s approval because the AP filed a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds for being excluded from the White House press briefing room because it would not identify the Gulf of Mexico by the new name Trump has chosen for it.

So forgive me if I don’t give Ed Martin the benefit of any doubt when it comes to protecting his president’s party.

We need to know the basis of why the D.C. police’s request for an arrest warrant remains unsigned. Have similar arrest warrants, where there is physical evidence and a party admission, historically also gone unsigned by the Department? In this case, is it to protect Mills because of his position as a House member? Specifically, did anyone call in a favor?

Is it because Speaker Mike Johnson can’t afford to lose a single other vote on his budget to have any hope of getting it passed?

I’m just asking questions.