An aide to Mitch McConnell twice stonewalled a journalist’s questions about whether the missing Republican senator will be putting out a video statement to prove he’s alive and on the mend.
Spokesperson Robert Steurer, 59, who has worked on McConnell’s team for more than two decades, refused to answer questions from independent journalist Nicholas Ballasy on two separate occasions on Wednesday.
Ballasy uploaded video of both encounters to X. The latest features Steurer, who stands to earn more than $226,000 this year from his role on McConnell’s team, simply walking away from the camera as Ballasy asks about a possible video statement from his boss.
Nor is it the first time Ballasy has confronted the veteran Kentucky Republican’s staff in public in a bid to get answers about his disappearance from them.
He also stopped the senator’s press secretary, Stephanie Penn, earlier this month. She similarly declined to even acknowledge the journalist was there, smiling manically and waving at other people as she passed them by.
McConnell, 84, was last seen in public on June 14, when emergency services were dispatched to his home in Washington. Medics logged the incident as a cardiac arrest and reported CPR being performed before the Kentucky senator was transported to George Washington University Hospital.
His office said nothing about his health for almost a month. Their silence sparked rampant conspiracy theories online that the senator is either dead or on life support. Far-right activist Laura Loomer went so far as to claim she’d been told by sources that the senator is “brain dead.”
Chief of staff Terry Carmack runs McConnell’s operation. He joined the payroll in 2010 and assumed the top post four years ago. His salary, like Steurer’s, is expected to run past $226,000 this year, and like Steurer, he has remained tight-lipped about their boss’s well-being.
McConnell’s team dropped their first substantive update on his health on July 12. They issued a statement and a photo of the senator sitting up in bed beside his wife Elaine Chao, 73, and holding a copy of that day’s newspaper.
The statement said he had no broken bones, and that he had not suffered a heart attack, a concussion, or a stroke prior to being admitted. It said only that he had briefly lost consciousness and had since picked up a mild case of pneumonia at the clinic.
Social media users were quick to slam the image as an AI fake. They said much the same of a second, released last week, that showed McConnell in much the same pose, his wife beside him again. Doctors have since said that the senator is “not yet medically cleared” to leave rehab.
