Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) speaks on the phone on Capitol Hill in April.Francis Chung/AP
Last month, Cory Mills’ career in Congress imploded when the Florida Republican lost his primary by 13 points. Now part of a weapons facility operated by a company that Mills co-owns has exploded.
The incident occurred on Wednesday evening at a Pacem Defense facility in northern Florida and caused no injuries, the Taylor County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. Mills, who entered Congress in 2023, has said that he stepped away from running his arms companies years ago, but he still owns a majority stake in Pacem Defense, according to his most recent congressional financial disclosure.
The explosion at Pacem Defense, which specialized in making and selling high explosive grenades to foreign militaries, was apparently massive. The Taylor County Sheriff’s Office said in its statement that one building at the Pacem facility sustained “significant damage” in the explosion, adding on Facebook that “[m]any residents heard and felt” it. One person who lives about three miles away from the facility wrote on the site that her brick home started shaking.
The sheriff’s office said that neither of the workers who were at Pacem Defense at the time of the explosion was harmed. It added that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Department of Defense, and the Florida state Fire Marshal’s office are now involved in the investigation.
The blowup is only the latest challenge for Mills. Since 2025, the scandal-plagued Florida man has been accused of stealing valor, placed under a restraining order by a judge after subjecting an ex-girlfriend to “dating violence” via cyberstalking, and was nearly arrested after being accused of domestic assault by a different girlfriend. (That partner later retracted the allegation, and no charges were filed.) As I reported in a February profile of Mills, the full list is much longer.
Nevertheless, Mills managed to secure Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement” earlier this year. Despite that support, Mills was easily defeated in his August primary by Ryan Elijah, a former local TV news anchor.
In late 2025, Pacem indefinitely furloughed many of its employees after racking up tens of millions of dollars in debt, according to court records. It has remained largely shuttered since then, a former employee told me on Thursday. (In March, Craig Pittman called the Pacem facility a “ticking time bomb.”)
According to a Florida court filing, Pacem ended up owing a Canadian lender more than $66 million. In another case, Pacem is subject to an order under which it is obligated to pay $8 million to an arms company that bought grenades from Pacem but never received them. A status update submitted in federal court on Wednesday states that Pacem has still not “paid any portion of the judgment amount.”
Mills’ financial disclosure states that he also maintains a 100 percent interest in Pacem Estate Holdings, the real estate entity that owns the site where the explosion on Wednesday occurred. According to court records, Pacem Estate Holdings continued to receive $12,000 per month in rent from another Pacem entity while the company’s employees were out of work.
Last Thursday, after remaining mostly silent on social media in the wake of his primary defeat, Mills struck a defiant tone on X—posing in front of a wall of fire and water in a tight polo with a Swiss watch that can sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
“A Phoenix rises from the ashes,” Mills declared. Six days later, the ashes appear to have become real.
