Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was taken to a hospital on Wednesday night after a fall at a Washington-area hotel, his spokesman said in a brief statement.
(Bloomberg) — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was taken to a hospital on Wednesday night after a fall at a Washington-area hotel, his spokesman said in a brief statement.
The statement added that McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, had “tripped during a private dinner” and had been admitted to the hospital, where he was being treated. The statement, from David Popp, the senator’s communications director, didn’t provide more details or name the hospital.
Popp didn’t elaborate beyond the statement.
Vito Maggiolo, a spokesman for the District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services said that an ambulance was dispatched to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue at 9:17 p.m. on a report that someone had been injured in a fall.
He said the injured person had been taken to an area hospital, but declined further comment.
McConnell, who turned 81 last month, was first elected to the Senate in 1984. He is the longest serving party leader in Senate history. Before his political career, he worked on Capitol Hill and was an assistant attorney general in the Ford administration.
In a Senate career extending more than three decades, McConnell rose to become a leading appropriator, chair of Senate Republicans’ campaign committee and, eventually, Republican leader, beginning in 2007. He was majority leader from 2015 until 2021.
(Updates with DC Fire spokesman, in paragraph. An earlier version corrected McConnell’s age.)
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