A top political strategist says it is time for Sen. Mitch McConnell’s aides to lawyer up as his health mystery nears its seventh week.
Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt tells The Daily Beast Podcast that the issue regarding the 84-year-old McConnell is “the incandescence of the corruption.”
Since McConnell’s June 14 hospitalization for what he describes as a fall followed by pneumonia, he has provided two photos of himself. Yet McConnell’s voice has not been heard, and there is no video proof of his well-being, despite claims he is undergoing “intense physical therapy.”
This uncertainty about McConnell’s condition is becoming a serious problem for his staffers not just politically, but potentially legally, Schmidt suggested.
“Here’s my advice to the Mitch McConnell team: Get lawyers!” Schmidt told host Joanna Coles. “I think this is a fraud that’s being perpetrated upon the taxpayer and whatever statute is applicable. I think there’s a high likelihood that what they’re doing here is illegal. I don’t think that Mitch McConnell is alive... I don’t think he’s sentient.”
Schmidt says he does not believe the photo McConnell’s team released on Monday was “real.”
“I don’t think Mitch McConnell’s walking out of the hospital,” he added.
Schmidt defended Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear over criticisms that he is not doing enough to get to the bottom of McConnell’s health mystery. Beshear, a Democrat, has written to McConnell and demanded that he prove his capacity to serve or resign.
Schmidt said Beshear “can’t show up at the hospital and declare, ‘It’s I, Andy Beshear, governor of the Commonwealth, let me into the room.’ Right?”
He added, “And by the way, Andy Beshear’s not in that political party that wants to be in your hospital room with you at the moment of birth, at the moment of death, that’s peering through the bedroom window.”
“Andy Beshear’s in the party that believes in personal liberty and privacy. So as long as Mitch McConnell is in the hospital room, protected by the Capitol Police, who don’t necessarily know what’s going on in the hospital room, where the doctors and the nurses are governed by confidentiality provisions and HIPAA law, who’s to know?”
Schmidt added that the uncertainty is indicative of how “rotten” an era we are in.
“We live in an era that’s so rotten and where the lie has so strangled the truth, that whether a man who served in the United States Senate since 1985 and wrecked it, by the way, more than any other—the world’s greatest deliberative body, turned it into a farce and a joke around the world—whether he’s alive or not, after all the damage he did, this is like the penultimate episode of a writer’s fantasy ending for Veep,” Schmidt said. “And so who’s to know? That’s how rotten our country has become. It’s impossible to know.”
McConnell’s office is led by longtime aide Terry Carmack, who is set to make $226,000 this year.
McConnell’s communications director is Stephanie Penn, who last Thursday ignored a reporter’s questions about the senator. Penn makes $106,999 annually.
McConnell’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
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