WASHINGTON — Democrats are seizing on a complaint filed against the Republican who took down scandal magnet Rep. Cory Mills last month, illustrating their continued interest in a race where the GOP is generally favored to win.
A voter in Republican congressional hopeful Ryan Elijah’s district filed a complaint accusing him of neglecting to properly divulge the assets he’s holding in his retirement accounts in his House financial disclosures.
The 54-year-old former TV anchor listed having over $1,000,001 in a Fidelity 401(k) account and over $50,001 in a Charles Schwab retirement account.
“For neither account did Mr. Elijah identify a single underlying asset. No stock, no bond, no mutual fund, no exchange-traded fund, no cash position,” Florida 7th District voter Sarah Austin’s complaint filed with the House Ethics Committee Wednesday said. “House rules do not permit this.”
“On the face of his own filing, the overwhelming majority of his portfolio is invisible to the voters who will decide whether to send him to Congress,” the complaint went on.
Elijah did detail some holdings in Boeing, Tesla, Nvidia, and elsewhere. A spokesperson said that it was an honest mistake that the aspiring freshman congressman didn’t itemize his retirement accounts.
“We didn’t itemize the retirement accounts valued at approximately one million dollars, which apparently is a common mistake as even the complaint acknowledges,” spokesperson Erin Isaac told The Post.
“We’re amending the filing.”
The Cook Political Report rates Elijah’s 7th Congressional District race in Florida as a “likely” Republican seat. But Democrats appear interested in the race nonetheless, seemingly hopeful that a blue wave and the myriad of controversies around Mills (R-Fla.) could help them expand their map.
“Ryan Elijah spent his entire primary campaign not disagreeing with Cory Mills on policy but making the Congressional Ethics Committee investigation the lynchpin of his campaign without making sure that his own house was in order,” Travis Tazelaar, the political director at the Democratic VoteVets group, told The Post.
“The hypocrisy here is striking.”
End Citizens United President Tiffany Muller similarly accused Elijah of hypocrisy.
“Ryan is denying voters the ability to identify potential conflicts of interest and raising serious questions about what he doesn’t want them to know,” Muller said in a statement.
Last month, Elijah took down Mills in a competitive primary. Mills faced a string of scandals. Last year, the DC Metropolitan Police Department probed accusations that he had assaulted a female Republican activist at his penthouse.
The outgoing congressman was not charged in that incident, and noted that she later retracted elements of her complaint. The Ethics Committee noted that “a decision not to bring charges is not a finding of innocence or ‘no wrongdoing.’”
She let cops listen to audio of a phone call in which the Florida rep. “instruct[ed] her to lie about the origin of her bruises” and Mills later “admitted [to officers] that the situation escalated from verbal to physical,” NBC News reported.
His ex-girlfriend, Lindsey Langston, accused him of attempting to blackmail her with revenge porn in text messages that have since become public.
Mills also faced scrutiny from the House Ethics Committee over whether he made misrepresentations on his financial disclosures.
During his campaign against President Trump-endorsed Mills, Elijah underscored the congressman’s litany of scandals and warned that he would be vulnerable in a general election.
