Pete Ricketts Town Halls Controversy Nebraska

A Reporter Asked Pete Ricketts a Question. He Motioned for the Police.

A TMZ reporter asked Nebraska's senator about Mitch McConnell's seven-week absence from the Senate. Ricketts told him to pray, then signaled Capitol Police to remove him and a colleague from a public hallway. A day later he apologized.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 01, 2026

A Reporter Asked Pete Ricketts a Question. He Motioned for the Police.

On Thursday, July 30, a reporter for TMZ's new Washington bureau caught up with Pete Ricketts in a hallway of the Russell Senate Office Building and asked him a question.

It was not a hard question. Sen. Mitch McConnell has been gone from the Capitol since June 14, hospitalized for a health problem his office has never explained. His staff put out a photo of him smiling in a hospital bed. Charlie Cotton wanted to know whether McConnell owed the public more than a photo.

Ricketts gave the answer you'd expect: give Mitch time to recover, we're praying for him.

Then he motioned to Capitol Police to make the reporters go away.

He told police they weren't really reporters

According to the video TMZ posted, Ricketts didn't just walk off. He gestured to law enforcement and suggested Cotton and another journalist weren't acting as reporters.

Cotton pointed out the obvious problem with that: he had already cleared security to get into the building. He and his colleague had come up from the basement of Russell like everybody else. They were standing in a public hallway where credentialed press are allowed to stand — a hallway that exists, in large part, so that reporters can ask senators questions.

Police stopped them anyway.

The video hit more than 200,000 views. Reporters from other outlets — including ones with no love for TMZ's celebrity-news style — publicly backed Cotton, because the principle doesn't depend on who's holding the microphone.

The next morning, Ricketts posted an apology. He said he "reacted poorly." He called Cotton to say so, and Cotton accepted, saying he respects "anyone who can take accountability when they make a mistake."

Good. The apology is the right thing. But the apology is not the story. The instinct is the story.

The instinct is what should worry Nebraska

Think about what has to be true inside a person's head for that to be their first move.

A citizen with a camera asks a United States senator a question about the health of another United States senator — a question about whether the public is being told the truth about who is and isn't showing up to vote on their behalf. And the senator's reflex is not to answer, not to say "no comment," not even to keep walking. It's to point at armed officers and get the questioner removed.

Ricketts works for us. The Capitol Police work for us. He used one to shield himself from the other.

And the underlying question was legitimate. A senator had been missing from his job for seven weeks with no public explanation. Senators vote on our health care, our food assistance, our taxes. Whether one of them can do the job is not gossip. It's the most basic possible question about whether the government is functioning.

What happens when Ricketts does face people

To his credit, Ricketts has not always hidden. In April 2025 he held open town halls in Kearney, Valentine, and Scottsbluff, at a time when Republican leadership was telling members to avoid them.

Here's what happened. In Kearney — a Republican stronghold — a crowd of about 200 booed him repeatedly. Nebraskans grilled him on DOGE cuts, on tariffs, on the budget. The crowd turned rowdy. He stood there and defended himself, saying he'd told the White House the tariffs were hurting Americans.

Then he went back to Washington and kept voting with them anyway.

That's the pattern, and the hallway video is a smaller version of it. Ricketts will show up. He will absorb the anger for an hour. What he will not do is change anything, and what he will not tolerate is being pinned down in a moment he didn't schedule.

He is not a man who has to answer to anyone

Ricketts is a billionaire. His family founded TD Ameritrade. He did not win his way into the Senate — he was appointed to the seat in January 2023 by Nebraska's governor, after serving eight years as governor himself.

Most politicians spend their careers being asked uncomfortable questions by people who can hurt them. Ricketts has never really had to. When you have never needed anyone's permission, being asked something you don't want to answer doesn't register as democracy. It registers as trespassing.

That is exactly what he told the police.

He apologized the next morning, and he deserves credit for that. But a person's first reaction tells you more than his second one. Nebraskans should notice which one came first — and remember that the next person who asks Pete Ricketts an inconvenient question might not have 200,000 people watching.