Senate GOP communicating w/ McConnell post fall & concussion as physical rehab continues

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He also sits atop a multimillion-dollar fortune, thanks to his wife, former cabinet secretary Elaine Chao, and the well-timed investing of a small inheritance he and his wife received soon after his mother-in-law died in 2007. Today, McConnell and Chao—who own homes in Louisville, Kentucky, and Washington, D.C., along with a large portfolio of stocks, bonds and money market funds—are worth an estimated $30 million.

The great-grandson of a Confederate soldier and son of a World War II veteran who later worked for DuPont, McConnell wasn’t born wealthy. As a young boy in the Deep South, he contracted polio. “I recovered, but my family almost went broke,” McConnell said in a 1990 campaign ad. His family moved to Kentucky when he was 13, according to his memoir, The Long Game, and McConnell stayed in the state for college and law school. He snagged his first job in D.C. in 1968, working as the chief legislative assistant to Kentucky Sen. Marlow Cook. The work paid $17,000 a year, or about $130,000 in today’s dollars. Sixteen years later, in 1984, McConnell won his own Senate seat, guaranteeing him a steady, upper middle-class salary. He has stayed there now for more than 35 years and, as minority leader, earns $193,400 today. (He and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer make the same, while all other senators pull in $174,000).

For years, his wife has made more. Chao, McConnell’s second wife, was serving as the CEO of the United Way when the couple got married in 1993, following stints in finance, and in Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush’s transportation departments.

In 1997, McConnell reported on his Senate financial disclosure that Chao earned $112,000 from 18 speeches to groups such as Penn State and Southwestern Bell Corp., in addition to a salary from her job at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation and director’s fees from a board position with the National Association of Securities Dealers. And in 2001, when George W. Bush made Chao the country’s first Asian American woman in the cabinet, she was serving on the boards of at least ten corporations. It was enough to make them comfortable, but not filthy rich. That year, McConnell listed his family’s assets at somewhere between $2 million and $4.5 million on a financial disclosure. The vast majority of those holdings were attributed to Chao.

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