Clinton campaign goes nuclear on health rumors The issue of Clinton’s health has percolated in certain circles since her concussion in late 2012.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is pushing back even harder Thursday on multiple “deranged conspiracy theories” about her health, as one top aide put it earlier in the week, as Donald Trump continues to stoke doubts about the Democratic nominee’s “mental and physical stamina.”

As news broke Wednesday about the shakeup in Trump’s campaign, including the hiring of Stephen Bannon from Breitbart as its chief executive and the promotion of pollster Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager, the Drudge Report blared a report about — pillows. Not just any pillows, but cushions that, as a link to the Tuesday article from the right-leaning Heat Street stated, “propped up” the former secretary of state while she recorded a podcast for her campaign. The same piece went on to show Clinton seated on various other pillows in public appearances. “The pillows provide much needed support,” the article concluded, without making any explicit inferences about Clinton’s health or recently circulated documents purporting to be from the Democratic nominee’s doctor showing her in dire condition. (Factheck.org has debunked the documents as fake.)


Thousands of social-media users also shared an "exclusive" story by InfoWars, the conspiracy-fueled website run by Alex Jones, that ran under the all-caps headline, "#HILLARYSSTOOLS: CLINTON USING CHAIRS AS CRUTCHES IN COUNTLESS SPEECHES."

Trump has dipped his toe in the same waters, without explicitly embracing any of the theories floating around various far-right sites. Speaking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity at a town hall event in Wisconsin taped Tuesday but aired Wednesday night, Trump said of Clinton, "She doesn't really do that much. She'll give a speech on a teleprompter, and then she'll disappear.

“I don't know if she goes home [and] goes to sleep. I think she sleeps,” Trump told Hannity, who has made it a point on his show to bring up the various theories and narratives surrounding Clinton’s bill of health. “I guess she takes a lot of weekends off. She takes a lot of time off. And you know, that's frankly — frankly, it's really not fair."

Trump’s campaign doubled down Thursday, with spokeswoman Katrina Pierson telling MSNBC that it’s “extremely important to note that Hillary Clinton has taken a lot of time off the campaign trail.”

“He said that she doesn’t have the strength or the stamina for a very long time. That part is nothing new,” Pierson said. “What’s new are the other reports of the observations of Hillary Clinton’s behavior and mannerisms, specifically with what you just showed in those previous clips, as well as her dysphasia, the fact that she’s fallen, she has had a concussion…”

MSNBC’s Kristen Welker cautioned that there are no indications that Clinton has fallen, but Pierson continued her argument.

“It’s something that needs to be addressed,” she said. “She’s taken a lot of time off the campaign trail. She hasn’t had a press conference this year… There are a number of things that Hillary Clinton needs to be discussing that she isn’t.”

The issue of Clinton’s health has percolated in certain circles, including on Hannity's shows since her concussion in late 2012 after her doctor said she fainted as a result of dehydration caused by a stomach virus. (On his Aug. 9 broadcast of his radio show, he speculated that Clinton may have had a "stroke.") The Clinton campaign has girded itself for battle against such theories, particularly after the hiring of Bannon from Breitbart, which has run multiple articles speculating about her health.

On Aug. 12, the site ran an article headlined "Hillary Says She Couldn’t Even ‘Get Up’ After Exhausting Convention" that quoted her comments in the podcast produced by her campaign. “By the end of those two weeks, that’s exactly how I felt. It was, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t know that I can get up, let alone what I will do if I am vertical,'" Clinton said. “I, knock on wood, am pretty lucky because I have a lot of stamina and endurance, which is necessary in the kind of campaign I’m engaged in."

The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America and the pro-Clinton super PAC Correct the Record, both founded by close Clinton ally David Brock, have fiercely contested all aspects of the theories.

And on Thursday, chief Clinton strategist Joel Benenson mocked Trump’s obsession with his opponent’s energy and health, telling MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that it "must be driving his ego crazy that she's outworking him, out-thinking him, connecting better with the American voters about the issues that matter in their life."

Benenson also issued a call for Trump to release more information than the note the campaign released from his physician, not an internist but a gastroenterologist, last December. In that statement, Harold Bornstein attested that Trump’s test results were “astonishingly excellent” and that the candidate “will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

"I mean, what a ludicrous thing for a physician to say. He hasn't examined a single other person other than Donald Trump who's running for president. It's bogus and ludicrous," Benenson continued, calling on Trump to release his tax returns as well.

The allegations are “ludicrous,” “ridiculous” and “trumped-up,” Benenson went on to say, indicators of a “desperate candidate who since his convention has had his net favorable rating decline by 15 points. The man is 32 points underwater.”

As for why the 70-year-old Trump would be making negative comments about the health of someone a little more than a year younger than him, Benenson suggested it’s because he is “terribly weak right now.”

“I think his ego is probably battered because he's getting battered in the polls, which he used to love to cite. I think because he's a man who’s feeling kind of — you know, a little at a loss right now,” he mused. "He's been unraveling for weeks since the convention, going after the family of a fallen war hero, a man who gave his life to safe his troops for this country."

Communications director Jennifer Palmieri denounced Trump’s rhetoric earlier Tuesday evening as pushing “deranged conspiracy theories” cribbed from longtime ally Roger Stone.

The Clinton team, which released a letter from internist Lisa Bardack on July 31, 2015, shared the same correspondence with an updated statement from the physician affirming her good health. A person who answered the phone at Bardack's practice on Thursday hung up on a POLITICO reporter when informed of his identity. Bornstein's office told POLITICO that he was not available to speak.

"As Secretary Clinton's long time physician, I released a medical statement during the campaign indicating that she is in excellent health. I have recently been made aware of allegedly ‘leaked’ medical documents regarding Secretary Clinton with my name on them,” Bardack said in a statement released through the campaign earlier this week. “These documents are false, were not written by me and are not based on any medical facts. To reiterate what I said in my previous statement, Secretary Clinton is in excellent health and fit to serve as President of the United States."

Clinton’s doctor's note from last July proved ample fodder for board-licensed internist and media personality Drew Pinsky, who on Tuesday suggested to a California radio station that the former secretary of state was not receiving adequate care for someone suffering from hypothyroidism, in addition to the clot, or transverse sinus venous thrombosis, she sustained following the concussion.

Armour Thyroid, the treatment for her hypothyroidism, “is very unconventional and something that we used to use in the 1960s,” Pinsky remarked, as he fretted about her seeming “1950 level sort of care.”

"This is an exceedingly rare clot. I have only seen one in my career. It just seems like she's getting care from somebody that she met in Arkansas when she was a kid and I just — you gotta wonder. You got to wonder,” Pinsky said, even though Clinton has seen the Mount Kisco, New York-based Bardack for the better part of the last two decades. “It's not so much that her health is a grave concern, it's that the care she's getting could make it a concern."

But Trump ally Newt Gingrich sharply criticized that line of questioning Thursday morning on Fox News after the show played a clip for his response.

"Well, I think first of all, just to get down to the human level for a second, all of us ought to include Hillary Clinton in our prayers. You can be opposed to somebody without hoping they have bad health and I hope that she's all right," Gingrich remarked. "Second, I’m always dubious, with all due respect to television doctors, when you have a doctor who has never seen the patient, begin to give you a complicated, fancy-sounding analysis — based on what?”

Gingrich urged caution, recommending to medical professionals to reconsider analyzing people they have not examined.

He added, “Because next, you're gonna get a left-wing psychiatrist explaining Donald Trump in negative terms.”