Cory Mills Is Ghosting His Staff and Suntanning With a Special Friend

Scandal-plagued Republican Representative Cory Mills has apparently gone “missing” from work after losing the GOP primary to TV reporter Ryan Elijah earlier this month.

The Daily Mail, citing anonymous sources, reports that the 46-year-old Florida congressman has decided to spend time “blowing off steam” at a $2 million beach house on New Smyrna Beach with 27-year-old aspiring model Catherine Chils. According to the tabloid, Chils and Mills have been spending time together for the last three years.

The day after the primary, August 19, Mills and his companion spent the day sitting in chairs on the beach for the whole day, a neighbor told the Daily Mail. “He had just sat outside and had kind of taken the day for himself,” the neighbor said. Mills was reportedly there through the weekend, although Chils denied to the publication that she was at the house and said she and the congressman are just friends.

However, Mills’s staff is concerned because he has stayed out of communication since his defeat. Even before the election, Mills missed scheduled TV appearances on Fox News and on a local TV station.

It’s not the first time Mills has disappeared, though. “The fact that he went missing and the staff can’t find him or hear from him is pretty bad but not surprising. He does this all the time,” another source told the tabloid. Mills reportedly has his own campaign bus that he sometimes sleeps in, making his whereabouts harder to ascertain.

The New Republic has emailed Mills’s press staff for comment and will update this story if they reply.

Mills is facing investigations from the House Ethics Committee and Department of Justice over alleged wire fraud and other financial misconduct, as well as allegations that he assaulted an ex-girlfriend, Republican state committeewoman and former Miss United States Lindsey Langston, at his apartment last year. Langston also alleges that Mills threatened to release revenge porn of her and violently attack men she dated after they broke up.

More recently, Mills has refused to deny that he dated a 19-year-old while serving in Congress, and President Trump pretended he didn’t endorse the congressman and knew he was going to lose all along. It seems like Mills is now just trying to run out the days until he leaves office in January.

Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico is sounding the alarm over potential voter suppression as Texas moves to shutter dozens of polling stations.

The Tarrant County Commissioners Court will vote Tuesday on a plan to reduce the county’s voting stations ahead of the midterm elections, the Associated Press reported. If approved, the key battleground county will scrap 92 polling stations just weeks ahead of the midterm elections.

Talarico, who is running against Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, voiced his concerns about the plan at a news conference Sunday. “The most powerful people in this county, the most powerful people in this country, don’t want us to be able vote easily,” Talarico said.

Tarrant County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig insisted that the reductions would focus on low-turnout polling sites. Voters would still have more than 200 locations where they can cast their votes.

“We’re clearly not trying to suppress the vote,” said State Representative Matt Shaheen, the Republican chairman of the House Elections Committee. “That’s a silly accusation.”

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and American Civil Liberties Union joined other voting rights groups to strongly condemn the proposal as a blatant “voter suppression tactic.”

“This proposal is a voter suppression tactic designed to impede Black voters and other voters of color from exercising their right to vote at the polls,” Demetria McCain, director of policy at the Legal Defense Fund, said in a statement.

This isn’t the first time Tarrant County officials have tried to gut the number of polling stations. In early August, they tabled plans to cut 140 sites amid overwhelming pushback.

Russia attended the G20 summit in North Carolina Monday, marking the first time that the nation has participated in the global economics meeting since it invaded Ukraine four years ago.

Russia’s finance minister, Anton Siluanov, attended alongside representatives of the Russian Central Bank at the invitation of Donald Trump. But the diplomat’s presence was not welcomed by all—European leaders spent much of the morning scorning Siluanov.

German vice chancellor and finance minister Lars Klingbeil scolded Siluanov, demanding that Russia end the war.

“I find the signal sent ​by ​receiving the ⁠Russian finance minister here quite troubling,” Klingbeil ​told reporters following the encounter, according to a translation provided by Reuters. “I ​would ⁠have wanted greater clarity from the American side that he ⁠should ​not be received ​here as a normal guest.”

“You cannot simply return to normality,” Klingbeil emphasized.

Tensions boiled again on the matter of the summit’s historic group photo, as European officials unanimously demanded that Siluanov not be included, else they would boycott the photo altogether.

The photograph was eventually taken without Siluanov. Instead, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posed for a solo picture with the Russian official.

Siluanov’s attendance and invitation were not announced by the Trump administration prior to Monday’s assembly, according to The New York Times, though the White House’s affinity for Russia should not come as a surprise. It was reported in April that Trump was planning to personally invite Putin to the G20 leaders’ December summit in Miami, and Trump has advocated for Russian participation in other Western alliances throughout his presidency. In 2018, he argued that Russia should be “at the negotiating table” of the G7. The following year he said the same, claiming that turning the G7 into the G8—with Russia—would be a “positive thing.”

The idea reemerged in 2025, when Trump said it was a “mistake” to keep Russia from the G7 and that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine if it had been included in the economic conference.

As Siluanov attended the G20 summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared at another summit in Kyrgyzstan, where he was set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Republicans want to air their TV ads for less, and they have the Trump administration’s support in asking the Supreme Court to allow it.

CNN reports that Republican campaign groups made an emergency appeal to the high court Monday to be able to air their television ads at a discounted rate, citing a Federal Communications Commission ruling earlier this year that political parties and associated entities are allowed to purchase ads at lower rates, just like politicians themselves can under federal law.

The rule change is arguably more beneficial to Republicans, who raise significant amounts through party committees, whereas Democrats typically raise funds through candidates themselves. Last week, though, a three-judge panel on the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal law only allows discounted ad buys for candidates, not for organizations and parties.

“The term ‘candidate’ means ‘candidate,’” U.S. Circuit Judge Robert King, a Clinton appointee, wrote in his ruling. The decision came in response to a lawsuit from four Democrats running for office this year: Representative Kristen McDonald Rivet of Michigan, former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, and former Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina.

In response, House and Senate Republican Party committees appealed to the Supreme Court, saying that they had “budgeted tens of millions of dollars in ad buys” under the FCC rule change, but because of the federal court ruling, “broadcast stations are already rescinding those rates.” The Trump administration quickly supported their appeal.

“The notice does not grant favored treatment to one side or the other; instead, the notice’s interpretation offers the same benefit to all sides, including the challengers themselves and the committees and parties supporting them,” said Solicitor General D. John Sauer on behalf of the White House to the Supreme Court.

With the midterms just two months away, the high court is expected to rule quickly. In the likely event that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority sides with the Republicans, voters are likely to see an even greater flood of pro-Trump ads between now and November.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s so-called “major fraud announcement” was just another lame attack on immigrants that won’t make roads any safer.

Speaking at a press conference Monday, the two officials declared the emergency shutdown of 110 commercial driver’s license, or CDL, schools, claiming they were responsible for 5,000 violations of federal safety standards requiring licensees to demonstrate English proficiency. “If you’re an illegal trucker, this is your worst nightmare,” Duffy wrote in a post on X Monday.

It didn’t take long for journalists at the event to pull apart the preposterous announcement.

One reporter pointed out that foreign-born drivers holding non-domiciled CDLs were responsible for just 17 fatal crashes in 2025. “The slant here has been strongly about illegals, foreign drivers, but yet it accounts, according to U.S. [Department of Transportation] stats I see, for one percent of the issue,” one reporter said.

Duffy pretended that the move had little to do with undocumented immigrants.

“You could have migrated to this country, you could have done it legally, but if you don’t speak English, you’re still violating our long-standing safety rules that you have to speak English,” Duffy said. “So this is not just about people who have come into the country illegally.”

Numbers from previous years suggest that licensing status, rather than immigration status or national origin, is the more relevant factor in deadly crashes. In fatal large truck crashes in 2021, 22.5 percent of drivers reportedly had no CDL at all. So the secretary’s decision to shutter schools, undermining access to essential safety training, has the potential to make roadways more dangerous.

About 20 percent of truck drivers in the U.S. are immigrants, and just 5 percent hold non-domiciled licenses, issued by states to people who are legally authorized to work in the country but do not have a permanent legal residence in that state. In March, the Trump administration revoked the non-domiciled commercial licenses of 200,000 truck drivers.

Last month, Trump ranted that his administration would soon take action against undocumented immigrant truck drivers, who were “killing a lot of people.”

“They can’t read signs. Many of them are on drugs or alcohol, and they shouldn’t be driving these things,” Trump claimed, vowing that his administration would enforce English proficiency requirements. At the same time, the Department of Transportation made it easier for U.S. military veterans to acquire CDLs by allowing them to bypass certain requirements.

Duffy announced that DOT would shut down another 160 schools that were previously certified to train truck drivers, but lacked classrooms, adequate space for driving tests, and employed unlicensed instructors.