**WASHINGTON** — Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described an odd scene aboard Air Force One in which senior officials spent about 90 minutes trying to decide whether an unnamed passenger was merely asleep — or dead.
Rubio told the story on the Katie Miller Podcast, saying it happened while administration officials were flying home from China. The person was in an Air Force One conference room and barely moved, even with noise and activity nearby.
“We spent about 90 minutes sort of debating should we make a move?” Rubio said. “Should I call the doc? Should we deal with this?”
He said aides held back because waking someone from a deep sleep would be awkward. “Because it’s embarrassing if you wake them up,” Rubio said, picturing the reply: “Oh, I was just sleeping.”
The other possibility was far more serious. “But if they were dead, like what do you do?” he said. “You have a dead body on the plane.”
According to Rubio, the passenger slept through “a lot of noise” and did not appear to be “responding to any of the stimulus.” He also called the breathing “difficult,” which only raised the alarm. Still, he said, they talked for roughly an hour and a half instead of immediately shaking the person awake or sending for a doctor.
They never had to choose. “Luckily, the person was fine,” Rubio said.
He refused to name the sleeper. That gap quickly produced jokes online, including an unsupported guess that it was Sen. Mitch McConnell. There is no evidence for that claim or for other names floated on social media, and Rubio offered no hint.
The tale drew extra notice because Rubio had just been drawn into another sleep dispute involving President Donald Trump. At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing about a month earlier, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., asked whether Rubio had sat through meetings in which Trump dozed off.
“I’ve never seen him fall asleep,” Rubio said. “On the contrary, the guy doesn’t sleep, which is a big problem.” He said the president’s schedule keeps aides busy and that Trump sometimes calls him early in the morning.
Lieu rejected that account and cited Cabinet meeting video that he said showed Trump with his eyes closed while Rubio was speaking. “Secretary Rubio, I’m going to show you, in a moment, a video that shows you just lied to Congress,” Lieu said. Rubio stuck to his testimony that he had never personally seen Trump fall asleep. No formal congressional action from Lieu’s charge has been reported.
Rubio did not identify the Air Force One passenger, give the exact date of the flight or name the other officials in the debate. Once the traveler woke unharmed, he could treat the episode as a strange story. At the time, he suggested, it felt less funny.
