The Bug’s most senior roving correspondent and doyen of our SHHIT (Special Hard-Hitting Investigations Team) reporters, BOB TUSE, has been in Washington where he is trying to crack the true story about the health status of former US Republican Party congressional powerbroker, Senator Mitch McConnell.

WASHINGTON DC: Today I can report that after weeks of investigation I can so far find no hard evidence to support the many doubts and questions that have arisen in recent weeks about the health of Senator Mitch McConnell who has not been seen in public for almost two months.

But that does not mean I have given up my professional duty to uncover the facts for readers of The Bug.

Senator McConnell, who according to Wikipedia is 117 years old and has served in the Senate since 1925, has not been sighted since being hospitalised in mid-June after what his office declared was a fall that caused him to become “briefly unconscious”. At the time his office also denied that the Senator had suffered a stroke or a heart attack.

All sorts of wild rumours have been flying around Washington including claims that McConnell is in a coma, or worse.

My phoning around soon struck paydirt. On the very first call, in fact, which was to the Senator’s office on Capitol Hill.

An aide said they would release exclusively to me a new and previously unpublished photo to prove McConnell was alive and well. (main image)

The picture arrived with a statement saying that Senator McConnell was very pleased to meet on Monday this week at his Washington home with his good friend and fellow Republican from South Carolina, Senator Lindsey Graham.

But something just didn’t sit right with me about the snap.

After examining the photo very closely with a magnifying glass I found the cause of my concern.

In the pic McConnell is holding a copy of The Washington Post. Some cynics may see it as a “proof of life” prop.

But my magnifying glass revealed something far more disturbing. Where Monday’s date should be on the page of the newspaper visible in the photo, there is instead the words “insert Monday’s date here”.

How outrageous, I thought, and immediately rang Senator McConnell’s office again.

But, oddly, the aide who had sent me the photo was not all that interested in discussing my discovery even after I explained somewhat at length that the reference to the date was a huge scandal – “Dategate” as I labelled it.

It was shocking, I told the aide, that The Washington Post‘s relatively new owner, multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, was allowing such sloppy production processes that could only erode the paper’s national and international reputation.

Having no luck with his office, I resolved to raise my findings directly with Senator McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, a former cabinet secretary in the George W Bush and Donald Trump administrations.

I felt that she would be just as outraged about the newspaper’s decline under Bezos and would see the massive implications of Dategate.

I did just that, although when I rang I did not get to speak to her personally.

A housekeeper picked up the phone at the McConnell residence and I asked them to advise the Senator’s wife of my concerns about The Washington Post. This they undertook to do.

“Thank you sir,” the housekeeper said very politely, “I’ll let the widow McConnell know.”

Satisfied that the Dategate scandal was off and running, I went to the National Press Club on 14th street for lunch, and dinner, where I put my Bug expense account to good use sketching out my next steps to pursue the McConnell story.

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