Laura Loomer has called Mitch McConnell’s team “liars” as speculation grows over the state of the Republican senator’s health.
“Why does the text on the newspaper McConnell’s staff claim he’s holding look AI generated?” the MAGA conspiracy theorist, 33, posted on X Monday. She included a photo released by McConnell’s staff the day before, showing the 84-year-old smiling beside his wife and holding Sunday’s newspaper.
“The text is blurry and the tag on his shirt is blurred. Also, if he’s in the hospital, why is there no IV connected to him to monitor his health?” Loomer raged. “This is such bulls--t. His staff are liars.”
Loomer doubled down in an interview with The Washington Post on Monday. “She did not provide substantiating evidence but said no one at the White House had asked her to correct her public comments about McConnell’s condition or the photo,” the newspaper wrote.
The apparent lack of any request from Donald Trump, 80, or his office is intriguing. The administration has previously contacted Loomer to ask her to retract comments about issues it deems sensitive.
She rebuked Trump in May last year for accepting a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, calling the country’s royal family “jihadists in suits.” She later walked those comments back, telling The Daily Mail she’d had “a conversation with the president” and realized “that I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.”
Behind the photo fight is a health crisis McConnell’s office has said almost nothing about. The senator has remained out of public view since June 14, the day he collapsed at his home in D.C. and first responders performed CPR.
A recording of the 911 call placed from his home points to a possible cardiac arrest. He has not cast a vote on the Senate floor since June 11, and for nearly a month, his staff has refused to spell out what had put him in the hospital or when he might return to work.
Terry Carmack, 63, has guarded that silence most tightly. Carmack has been McConnell’s chief of staff since 2021 and has drawn a salary from the senator since 2010. He is set to be paid upward of $226,000 in 2026. For days, he has brushed off questions about whether his boss has even left the hospital.
McConnell’s disappearance from public view has MAGA’s conspiracy theory mill working overtime. Loomer has already claimed, citing a source she said was tied to the White House, that McConnell is “brain dead” and finished in Congress.
His GOP senatorial colleague, Ron Johnson, 71, went further on Monday. He told Real America’s Voice that a source had informed him the smiling photo was not new, saying he had “heard from some, some other source that was an older photo.” Johnson conceded he had not spoken to McConnell and could not stand behind the claim.
Other Trump allies piled on. Pundit Megyn Kelly, 55, told the audience for her YouTube show that the whole thing felt off, while conservative activist Kylie Jane Kremer pressed McConnell’s aides to release the photo’s underlying metadata.
His office had rolled out the Sunday photograph to quiet the rumors. It paired the image with a first-person letter in which he wrote that he had taken a fall, briefly passed out, and later came down with pneumonia, along with the Office of the Attending Physician’s own note on his condition.
The Washington Post dug into the image on Monday and found nothing to back the claims circulated by Loomer and others that the photograph had been doctored. At the paper’s request, McConnell’s office handed over the original image file, and the Post reported that its metadata appears to date the shot to Sunday.
Hany Farid, 60, a UC Berkeley professor who specializes in digital forensics, reviewed the file for the newspaper and saw no signs it had been faked or produced by AI. He told the paper that the faces of McConnell and his wife Elaine Chao, 73, raised no flags under the model he ran, that the lighting looked believable, and that the strip of newsprint visible in the senator’s grip matched the Post’s sports section from that day.
Farid did flag one wrinkle. Manipulated copies of the picture ricocheting around social media show garbled, floating characters across the newsprint, he said. But the file the office supplied was too low in resolution to render any such text legible, he added.
One widely shared post, seen over 4 million times, insisted Sunday’s image was virtually the same as a 2023 shot of the senator. The paper said it could not locate any such older photo.
On Monday night, Newsmax’s Greg Kelly asked President Trump what he thought of McConnell’s “outlook.”
“Well, I don’t hear much,” Trump answered. “I was, uh, never a huge fan.”
After complaining that McConnell isn’t supporting the SAVE America Act, Trump then added: “I hope he’s going to be fine. I—I don’t know if he’s fine, but I certainly hope he’s going to be fine.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on Loomer’s claims.
