"There is an old saying in politics, it's not the crime that’ll do you in, it's the cover-up," Mike Huckabee says. Huckabee: Clinton health 'cover-up' like Nixon

Donald Trump surrogate Mike Huckabee pounced on Bill Clinton's mistaken pronouncement of his wife's condition as the "flu" rather than the diagnosed case of pneumonia, suggesting Thursday that there is a "cover-up" about the Democratic nominee's health similar to the concealment operation that doomed the presidency of Richard Nixon.

"Well you know one of the things I was waiting to hear 'Dr. Bill Clinton, Dr. Bill Clinton, ER stat,'" the former governor of Arkansas told Fox News' Bill Hemmer in a segment of "America's Newsroom," cracking that the former president went "from being a campaigner to a medical diagnotician [sic]."


A spokesman for the former president said within minutes that Clinton misspoke in his remarks at a rally Wednesday afternoon in Nevada.

"The fact he called it the flu when the reality is her own doctor said it was pneumonia, does it matter? Here’s what matters," Huckabee said. "What matters is the cover-up. There is an old saying in politics, it's not the crime that’ll do you in, it's the cover-up. That’s what did in Nixon, and I think it’s what’s gonna do in Hillary Clinton."

Huckabee continued, "If she’d have come out and said look, I have three chronic diseases, here’s what they are, here’s how they affect me but I can still be president, people would have shrugged their shoulders and say you know what, a lot of people deal with issues."

"But that's not what has happened. She’s perfectly fit but she falls down," Huckabee said, alluding to Clinton's wobbliness leaving a 9/11 memorial early Sunday, citing heat exhaustion. "You know, she has these issues. Nobody really knows what it is. The latest is that it’s pneumonia, now Bill’s saying it's the flu. What the heck is it? It's the cover-up and that’s a problem for someone where 70 percent of Americans don't trust her anyway. This just adds to it."