Kentucky Gov. drops bombshell: agencies called to say Mitch McConnell is dead

Kentucky's governor says two agencies called to say his state's senior senator was gone, and now he's telling Republicans he may claim the power to fill the seat himself.

The governor of Kentucky picked up the phone twice — and twice, someone on the other end suggested Mitch McConnell was dead.

Not tipsters. Not trolls. Agencies. “Not state agencies,” Andy Beshear specified — which leaves exactly one level of government to wonder about.

Beshear dropped the bombshell in a Katie Couric interview published Wednesday, explaining why he’d spent early July publicly demanding answers about the 84-year-old senator’s vanishing act. “It had been a month before anything had been put out, not even an official statement from Senator McConnell,” he said. “In fact, I’d gotten two calls from different agencies — not state agencies — suggesting he’s passed.”

He never said which agencies. He never said exactly when. And McConnell’s office, asked to respond, went with its signature move: nothing.

Rewind to June 14. McConnell is found unconscious at his Washington residence and rushed to the hospital. Then — silence. No diagnosis, no timeline, no statement. For nearly a month, the most powerful Republican in modern Senate history simply ceased to exist in public, while GOP colleagues issued eerily similar testimonials about “lengthy” phone calls with their “old friend” and the internet convinced itself he was brain dead or worse.

Somewhere in that vacuum, by the governor’s account, the death calls came in.

By July 11, Beshear had had enough, publicly telling McConnell to end the “crazy speculation.” The next evening came the now-infamous photo: the senator beside wife Elaine Chao, clutching a July 12 Washington Post like a hostage holding the day’s paper. The statement blamed a fall, brief unconsciousness, and pneumonia — no stroke, no heart attack, no tumors, per the Capitol’s attending physician. The internet declared the photo AI; a Washington Post forensic review authenticated it. Sleuths fixated anyway — the bruised hand, the missing wedding ring — and Chao, fresh off a China trip during her husband’s hospitalization, was photographed Tuesday slipping out of the rehab facility in a face mask.

Beshear is not treating the photo as case closed. He wants a video, a call-in, anything a functioning senator does. His office, he says, has had zero contact with McConnell’s since June 14.

And the governor has already revealed his next move. “I might make some news right here,” he teased on Al Sharpton’s show Sunday — before pointing to a Kentucky constitutional provision he says lets him “appoint all state officers” when a vacancy hits — the GOP’s 2024 special-election law be damned. If the seat opens, the Democratic governor may simply name a successor and dare Republicans to sue. State Rep. Josh Calloway is already warning him off, and one name floating for the pick, per the Washington Times: Charles Booker — the Democrat already running for the seat.

The clock makes it combustible. If the vacancy comes after August 3, the untested law leaves no window for a special election — the seat sits empty until January, unless Beshear grabs it and the courts decide.

“If we end up there — and I hope we don’t — there’s at least going to be probably a disagreement,” the governor said.

Seventeen days to the deadline. Still no video.