On May 7, 2024, a woman walked down a hallway in a House office building and asked a congressman a question. He knocked her phone out of her hand.

The congressman was Mike Ezell, a Republican who represents Mississippi's 4th District and who describes himself as "a career law enforcement officer for more than forty years."

The whole thing was recorded, because the phone he hit was the one doing the recording.

What happened in the hallway

The Associated Press, whose account ran in the Mississippi Free Press, described it this way: Ezell was walking to a meeting of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee when two activists from the antiwar group CodePink approached him with questions about the war in Gaza. One asked whether Israel should accept a peace proposal.

"You want this genocide to continue?" one woman asked.

The second woman was Sumer Mobarak, who is Palestinian American. On the video, she asks him:

"You want the killing of my people, my Palestinian people?"

Ezell's answer, per the AP:

"Shut up. Knock it off."

And then, the AP wrote, the video "shows him extending a hand and knocking down the cellphone that was being used for recording."

Mobarak filed a police report alleging assault. U.S. Capitol Police told the AP they were looking into the incident and would not comment further. We found no public report of what, if anything, came of that review.

He is supposed to be the expert on this

Every part of Ezell's political brand runs through law enforcement. His official biography leads with it: a graduate of the Mississippi Law Enforcement Training Academy and the FBI National Academy, four decades on the job, most recently as sheriff of Jackson County.

In January 2026, after an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old American citizen and mother of three, Ezell issued a statement lecturing the country on exactly this subject:

"The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, religion, the press, peaceful assembly, and the right to petition the government. It does not protect violent behavior, obstruction of law enforcement, or attempts to harm officers because someone disagrees with their mission."

So he has a firm and well-articulated view about physical contact during a political disagreement — when someone else is accused of it.

A woman asked him a question in a public hallway. She was not blocking him. She was holding a phone. A man with forty years of training in when force is and isn't appropriate reached out and struck the object in her hands.

Then he made it about China

Here is where it stops being a bad moment and starts being a choice.

Ezell could have said he was startled, or that he shouldn't have done it, or nothing at all. Instead his office put out a statement about the woman who filed the police report:

"These China-backed protesters want to harass and intimidate Members of Congress into ending our support for Israel and our opposition to Hamas terrorists."

"I will not be harassed or intimidated by the Chinese Communist Party, Hamas, or their supporters, and I will continue standing with our Israeli allies against terrorism."

Read that again. A Palestinian American woman asked him about the killing of Palestinians. His answer was to publicly tie her to the Chinese Communist Party and to Hamas — a designated terrorist organization — in the same breath.

He offered no evidence for either claim. The AP noted only that CodePink says on its website that "China is not our enemy," which is a political opinion, not a payroll.

This is the oldest trick there is: you can't answer the question, so you make the questioner foreign. It's what politicians reach for when a constituent-shaped person shows up with a camera and a grievance they'd rather not discuss on the record.

Who he actually answers to on this

Ezell was not being asked about an abstraction. He votes on U.S. military aid, and he was asked what he thought about how it's being used.

There is a reason he had an answer ready about "our Israeli allies" and no answer at all about the Palestinians she was asking about. According to TrackAIPAC's tally of FEC filings, Ezell has taken $51,922 from pro-Israel PACs. FEC records compiled by Who Bought My Rep show AIPAC's own political action committee among his largest PAC donors, at $20,004.

That is not unusual, and that's the point — we've written about how a handful of billionaires funding AIPAC came to own Republican foreign policy votes, and about the House Foreign Affairs chairman who said there are "very few innocent Palestinian civilians" and then voted to delete the humanitarian exemption for food and medicine. Ezell is a smaller figure in that story. He is not a smaller example of it.

What it says about how he handles being questioned

The through-line here isn't Gaza. It's what Mike Ezell does when someone he doesn't want to talk to asks him something in public.

What his office offers constituents is a telephone town hall you sign up for in advance — a format where the questions get picked before anyone gets to ask one. In his home district, voters have spent his tenure asking each other on Facebook whether he's ever going to hold a real one. There is no room in South Mississippi where a voter gets to stand up, hold up a phone, and ask him something he didn't approve first.

In a hallway in Washington, somebody tried anyway.

He told her to shut up, hit her phone, and then told the press she worked for China.

Source

Activists: Ezell Swatted Phone From Palestinian Woman's Hand — Emily Wagster Pettus, The Associated Press, via Mississippi Free Press, May 8, 2024.