🍻 In This Week's Hill Spill Newsletter: Cory Mills' Political Career Meets Its Maker, Swalwell Meets the FBI, and Sinema Meets Her Bodyguard (Repeatedly), Per Court Filings

🍹 Welcome back to the Hill Spill — it's Thursday, which means the ice is out, the tea is cold and the receipts are hot!

We have got a week for you. Cory Mills finally got cut off by the voters of Florida's 7th, and his colleagues are not exactly hiding their glee. The FBI turned up at Eric Swalwell's airport gate and then his front door the same week his "Fang Fang" files dropped. Sean Duffy turned his Cabinet job into a sponsored reality show and Kyrsten Sinema took the stand to walk us, geographically, through her bodyguard affair. Plus a Dolly Parton cocktail worth standing up for!

Honestly, it was such a stacked recess that Nancy Mace debuting nine new tattoos — which, per the New York Post, she got during the stretch when her entire staff walked out and her engagement imploded, because she needed "the pain that I need to feel" — couldn't even find a slot this week. A woman got inked to process her ex-staffers and her ex, and it's only our fifth-biggest story. What a time to be alive.

Grab a drink and let's get into it. 🍸

It took a judge-issued restraining order, an active ethics probe, a DOJ inquiry, a reported 19-year-old girlfriend and allegations of sex workers on an Afghanistan rescue mission — but the voters of Florida's 7th finally found the one thing Cory Mills couldn't smirk, sue or fake self-fund his way out of. On Tuesday night, they cut him off, and a sizable number of his GOP colleagues are pouring themselves something celebratory.

Mills lost his primary in Florida's 7th to Ryan Elijah — a former Orlando TV news anchor — and it wasn't even close. Elijah won about 47 percent to Mills's 34 percent, a roughly 13-point gap, turning “not being Cory Mills” into a decisive night.

Here's how thoroughly Mills torched his own standing: his party didn't just let him lose; they helped shove him out. Fellow Florida Republicans Anna Paulina Luna and Mike Haridopolos took the rare step of endorsing against a sitting colleague. Nancy Mace, who'd led a failed effort to censure Mills and floated expelling him, backed Elijah too. DeSantis flatly said he doesn't support Mills. And Trump — who endorsed Mills back in February — left him off his pre-primary endorsement lists, then hopped on Truth Social the morning after: "I told Congressman Cory Mills of Florida, a friend of mine, to get out of the Race, but he wouldn’t listen. He thought he could win, so who can blame him? We now have a great candidate, Ryan Elijah, running in his place! Ryan stands for EVERYTHING MAGA, and is respected by ALL. He has my Complete and Total Endorsement!"

The schadenfreude wasn’t exactly subtle.

"Awe, poor Cory," one lawmaker who is decidedly not a fan told us.

Haridopolos was more measured but no less pointed: "There was no doubt in my mind that if Mills won the primary we would both lose the seat and spend millions in the process. Instead, Ryan Elijah stepped up for our county, his community, and for conservatives. He won this race and I am proud to support him," he told us.

It’s not totally shocking that his congressional colleagues thought he was a bit of a liability. There's an active House Ethics investigation covering campaign finance violations, misuse of congressional resources, improper gifts and dating-violence allegations. A separate DOJ investigation is also underway. A restraining order was granted last year after his ex, former Miss United States Lindsey Langston, accused him of threatening to distribute explicit videos of her. A separate police-investigated allegation that he physically assaulted another woman he was seeing ultimately produced no charges. Questions about his military record and possible stolen valor. Reports — which he recently declined to deny — that he dated a 19-year-old while serving in Congress.

Then the one everyone already knows: allegations he was caught with sex workers during the 2021 Afghanistan evacuation mission, staged out of Tbilisi, which reportedly left the rest of the group furious given what they were actually there to do. Mills has denied all of it and says he isn't even aware of a DOJ investigation. The money told the story anyway — he closed the last quarter with about $81,000 on hand…

One person who once had a close relationship with the congressman told us they were elated to see him go: "Cory Mills can no longer terrorize the streets filled with young women as a congressman — just an average groomer and grifter. DOJ, do your thing,” the source said.

Langston herself weighed in on X after the results came down: "There is a difference between vengeance and justice. Deo Gratias."

One more note from a source who clearly had thoughts: apparently the suits have been fitting a little snug lately, and the congressman may have packed on a few pounds. We love a petty observer, so in it goes.

Now for our own small contribution to the Mills lore. We can confirm the man was, shall we say, a lot. Mills recently reamed us out in the Speaker's Lobby over a photo we'd tweeted of him with a woman others on the Afghanistan trip identified as a sex worker — which he denies she was. Within hours of chewing us out, he texted us, unprompted and warm as ever, asking if we knew where the good mozzarella place was after overhearing a convo we were having with another member. Reader, we did not have the range.

Mills is out in January and Elijah faces Democrat Bale Dalton in November.

The Florida Republican did not respond to request for comment on his loss.

Eric Swalwell landed at SFO on Saturday night and walked into the FBI.

The Daily Mail broke it first. A source independently confirmed it to us: agents were waiting at San Francisco International with a search warrant, seized his devices on the spot, then came back Sunday to search his home in Washington, D.C.

Per the warrant inventory, they logged one white Apple iPhone, a charging cable and a MacBook Pro — seized at 8:25 p.m. and signed off under penalty of perjury by the FBI agent on scene. The warrant itself pointed to a statute covering deprivation of rights "under color of law" — plus "other offenses" the affidavit keeps sealed. It's all part of the criminal probe into the sexual misconduct allegations from several women that ended his governor's run and chased him out of Congress in April.

Five women have come forward with allegations. One accuses Swalwell of drugging her drink and raping her in a hotel room in 2018. Another says he assaulted her twice when she was too intoxicated to consent, back when she worked for him. Swalwell has denied all of it, calls the assault claim false and vows to fight. He has not been charged, but he remains under investigation and this weekend's searches show that case is escalating.

He also had a second scandal detonate this week!

On Monday, the White House Government Transparency Task Force dropped the declassified FBI files on his relationship with Christine Fang, the suspected Chinese intelligence operative better known to many as "Fang Fang," whom he spent years insisting was just a GOP talking point. Swalwell had tried to keep them buried. His lawyers sent a cease-and-desist in March, and as we scooped a couple weeks back, his team even pointed to a past relationship with Katie Miller to argue the release would look like political payback. Apparently a flawed strategy…

Across two FBI interviews in 2015 and 2016, Swalwell admitted "physical relations" with Fang on a handful of occasions, the last in March 2015, though he insists it was casual, never romantic and never dating. The FBI said Fang funneled disguised foreign-national contributions into his campaign at least twice in 2013 and twice more in 2014 and steered prospective interns toward his operation.

Fang showed up at his apartment late one night banging on the door, someone let her in, and the two "hooked up" — an encounter Swalwell says he barely remembers, because he'd taken an Ambien before she arrived. (We’d argue the worst way to channel Tiger Woods energy.) The whole thing came out of a three-year counterintelligence probe the FBI code-named "Freshman Fifteen."

Swalwell was never charged over Fang — prosecutors decided the case wasn't viable on national security grounds — and he maintains he did nothing wrong. His lawyer called the release recycled old news and political payback against a critic of the administration.

A raid, a sealed warrant, five accusers and a decade-old spy file — and it's not even the weekend yet!

With the declassified Swalwell files still fresh and the honeypot discourse in full swing, we brought in someone who actually ran this stuff for a living: Lindsay Moran, former CIA case officer and author of Blowing My Cover.

Strip away the spy-movie gloss and a real honeypot is less about sex than the long con — access, vulnerability, influence, Moran told us. She went on to tell us Washington is a playground for it, where ego is the great vulnerability and no, it's emphatically not partisan… They come for both sides.

She's pretty blunt about Swalwell, who Fang was cultivating before he ever reached Congress. "I looked at him, I'm like, I don't know about that guy," Moran told us, calling him exactly the kind of mark she'd have flagged in her operative days. We get into the intern pipeline into his office, whether foreign intelligence was quietly banking his other rumored misbehavior for later (her guess: 100%), and the tidbit that made us cackle — at the CIA, close contact with a foreigner meant paperwork, unless it was a one-night stand, which somehow didn't count. Cue every young officer weighing whether a date was, in her words, "worth the paperwork."

Grab a bev and tune in! 🍸

We spend a lot of time saying Washington runs like a reality show. Sean Duffy went ahead and made the text subtext — the crossover is now a real, six-episode thing.

Transportation Secretary — and, lest anyone forget, Real World: Boston alum — Sean Duffy dropped his long-delayed series The Great American Road Trip on the Department of Transportation's YouTube this week, an ode to America's 250th following Duffy, Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy and their nine kids across seven states.

The couple met filming MTV's Road Rules: All Stars in the late '90s, so this is less a career pivot than a homecoming. Snowmobiling in Montana, running the Rocky Steps, cameos from Trump, Doug Burgum, Kid Rock and a Benjamin Franklin reenactor — the whole civic-experience package.

Also making an appearance: Duffy's son-in-law Michael Alfonso — yes, the 26-year-old Wisconsin congressional candidate from last week's Venmo saga — turning up in episode one with his very manicured eyebrows in tow.

The sponsor roll is the part that got people talking: Boeing, United Airlines, Toyota, Shell, Royal Caribbean and Enterprise — companies that all happen to be regulated by the department Duffy runs. Critics note the family's road-trip perks (flights, hotels, a cruise, whitewater rafting, skiing) came courtesy of that sponsor-funded nonprofit, and CREW filed a complaint with the DOT inspector general in May over the arrangement. Duffy's side says the show cost taxpayers nothing, put no salary or royalties in his family's pockets and was signed off by career ethics officials. DOT has also said some of the secretary's own travel was treated as official America 250 work.

There's also the timing. The thing was supposed to launch in June to kick off summer road-trip season. It premiered this week, when a majority of American kids are already back in school. As of Thursday morning, the series had roughly 5,100 views.

The tonal range is something, too. One minute it's waterslides and the Rocky Steps, the next Duffy's at Harvard with his daughter Paloma warning that the Ivies "professionalize" figuring out how to "take good, young girls like you" and "corrupt their minds." Just a family vacation, sponsored by a defense contractor.

For the record, a sitting Cabinet secretary starring in his own sponsored reality show is a genuinely strange thing to exist, and reactions have ranged from "wholesome Americana" to "ethics dumpster fire." We land somewhere in the middle: the clips got us, and we've considered tuning in.

The line between C-SPAN and Bravo is officially gone. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Former Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D) just walked through her affair with her former bodyguard, Matthew Ammel, under oath.

In September 2025, Ammel’s now-ex-wife, Heather Ammel, sued Sinema under North Carolina’s alienation-of-affection law, which lets a spouse go after the third party they say wrecked the marriage. Heather accused Sinema of “willfully and intentionally” seducing her husband while knowing he had a family, and she’s seeking more than $75,000 in damages.

The filings include Sinema texting Matthew, “I miss you. Putting my hand on your heart. I’ll see you soon,” plus a photo of Sinema in a towel and a run of suggestive messages.

Sinema has admitted the affair. Her play is jurisdictional — she filed a motion to dismiss arguing the sex didn’t happen in North Carolina and that the spicy texts went out while he was somewhere else.

In a July 31 deposition, later filed with the court, she listed the cities: Napa, New York, Washington, Aspen and Phoenix.

Heather, in her own deposition, called Sinema an “insidious” woman who’s “willing to break up a family,” and described her husband as an “established liar and manipulator.”

Sinema isn’t fighting the affair, she’s fighting the map.

Written by Elisabeth Carroll.

A friend of the newsletter tipped us off to this gem, and since Dolly Parton is a certified queen, rhinestone royalty, patron saint of big hair and bigger hearts — and living proof that blondes do it better — we simply had to pour one in her honor. Working 9 to 5 has never gone down smoother. Here's to Dolly, the one American treasure who'd never do us dirty. 🥂

Fill a glass with fresh ice and strain the chilled mixture over top. Garnish with a skewer of Spanish queen olives and pickled giardiniera. Send us your favorite tips and drink suggestions, and until next week — cheers babes! 😘

🥂That's a wrap on this week's Hill Spill! Have thoughts? Tips? Receipts? We want it all. Email us and tell us what you loved, hated, and want to see more of. We'll be back next week with more tea, more chaos and more cocktails. Cheers!