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Clinton falls ill during 9/11 memorial service in New YorkClinton stumbles leaving 9/11 memorial ceremony
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A video shared on Twitter shows Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton being held up by her staff and helped into a van as she leaves the 9/11 memorial service because she was feeling "overheated."(Twitter/Zdenek Gazda via Storyful)
By Abby D. Phillip and Anne Gearan September 11 at 6:37 PM
NEW YORK — Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton fell ill during a memorial service marking the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and left abruptly, inserting new speculation about her health into a presidential campaign in which Republican Donald Trump has called her weak and unfit.
Video of Clinton’s hurried departure from the Ground Zero memorial showed her buckling and stumbling as she got into her van. Clinton’s campaign issued a statement from her doctor later Sunday revealing that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia two days earlier.
The video, circulated on Twitter, appeared to show Clinton, 68, flanked by several Secret Service agents who are regulars on her detail, leaning against a security bollard while agents prepare to help her into a black van. As she steps forward, Clinton can be seen falling as agents help lift her into the van.
“Secretary Clinton has been experiencing a cough related to allergies,” Dr. Lisa R. Bardack said in the statement. “On Friday, during follow up evaluation of her prolonged cough, she was diagnosed with pneumonia. She was put on antibiotics, and advised to rest and modify her schedule. While at this morning’s event, she became overheated and dehydrated. I have just examined her and she is now re-hydrated and recovering nicely.”
A planned trip to California and Nevada wearly this week is now under review.
Clinton says she's feeling better after falling ill at 9/11 memorial
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Hillary Clinton left a New York memorial service marking the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks early after feeling "overheated," according to a campaign spokesman. She emerged from her daughter's New York apartment later and said she feels better. (The Washington Post; Photo: Yana Paskova, The Post)
Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said Clinton left the ceremony early and retreated to her daughter Chelsea’s apartment in the Gramercy neighborhood of lower Manhattan.
Clinton was not seen for more than two hours, after which she emerged from daughter Chelsea Clinton’s apartment building, walking normally, smiling and waving.
The incident quickly renewed attention to Clinton’s health. Trump has repeatedly questioned her well-being, saying that she doesn’t have the “strength” or “stamina” for the presidency and accusing her of being “exhausted” and sleeping too much.
A coughing episode on Labor Day had prompted a fresh round of questions about Clinton’s health. During a speech during a festival in Cleveland, Clinton started coughing repeatedly at the outset of her remarks, took several sips of water and a lozenge and continued to sound hoarse as she spoke. Later that day, she interrupted a question-and-answer session with reporters in the back of her plane after she started coughing. Clinton told reporters her condition was due to “seasonal allergies.”
An initial campaign statement about Sunday’s illness did not mention the pneumonia diagnosis from two days prior, adding to public specualtion that the campaign was hiding something. Clinton had appeared healthy when she convened a meeting of national security experts Friday afternoon in New York.
Neither Trump, who is 70, nor his aides responded immediately for requests for comment Sunday. But the attacks have intensified in the past month as unverified and often debunked theories about Clinton’s health have floated around the Internet. And although Sunday’s incident prompted an avalanche of speculation on social media, Trump was uncharacteristically silent.
Both Clinton and Trump had planned to take the day off from formal campaigning in observance of the Sept. 11 anniversary. Trump attended the same memorial service at Ground Zero.
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), a Long Island congressman who stood with Trump’s group at the ceremony, said he spoke with Trump shortly after Clinton departed.
“It was actually Trump who told me what was going on,” King said in an interview Sunday. “He leaned over and told me that ‘Hillary wasn’t feeling well.’ I said, ‘Really?’ That was all he said.”
A former Secret Service agent said that the detail’s movements show they had not planned for her to leave that early and had to make up some rushed security plans on the fly. Clinton’s van was not in place when she arrived at the curb and her detail leader, normally in charge of sticking by her side at all times, had to leave her momentarily to open the door of her van.
[Secret Service may have broken protocol during Clinton’s hasty departure from 9/11 commemoration Sunday]
A small group of reporters traveling with Clinton were left behind, and not immediately informed that she had left.
Clinton had arrived at the memorial site at 8:18 a.m. Reporters traveling with Clinton became aware about 9:36 a.m. that she was no longer standing where she had been, near several Democratic officials. By 9:48 a.m., her campaign confirmed that Clinton had left the viewing area but offered no more details until about 11 a.m.
Later, shortly before noon, Clinton was seen leaving daughter Chelsea’s apartment on East 26th Street — about a 15-minute drive from Ground Zero. She hugged a young girl and posed for a picture with her, waved and briefly answered questions shouted by waiting reporters before she departed in her motorcade.
lClintoneft the apartment wearing the same long-sleeved dark blue suit she had been wearing at the memorial.
“I’m feeling great, it’s a beautiful day in New York,” Clinton said.
Just before noon, it was 82 degrees and humid at Ground Zero, though it was probably a bit cooler when Clinton left two hours earlier. Reporters traveling with Clinton could not see her directly, but the politicians around her were all standing and packed tightly together. It was not clear if she was standing in direct sunlight, but there was little shade anywhere at the service.
“Hillary and I chatted for quite a while about our remembrances of 9/11/01 and our families,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who also attended the ceremony, in an emailed statement. “It was pretty hot out there, but she seemed fine to me, and left on her own accord.”
Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), who stood near Clinton at the ceremony, said “everything seemed normal when I greeted her. She gave me a big hug and a kiss.”
“I’m not shocked to hear she got a little light-headed because of the stifling heat,” Crowley said, adding that he and others were sweating through their shirts. “I needed a gallon of water myself.”
Crowley said it is unfortunate that this episode will feed into conspiracies about Clinton’s health. He said anyone could have been similarly affected and Clinton tends to be held to her own “demigod” status.
Clinton has been generally healthy as an adult, with the exception of clotting in one leg in 1998 and a concussion and associated health problems from a fall in December 2012. But she has been repeatedly criticized by conservatives and accused of hiding more serious health issues.
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, a close adviser to Trump who is regularly at his side on the campaign trail, said last month that he thinks Clinton is “tired” and “looks sick.”
“What you’ve got to do is go online,” Giuliani said on “Fox News Sunday” in late August, accusing the media of hiding information about Clinton’s health. “So, go online and put down Hillary Clinton illness, take a look at the videos for yourself.”
If he wins, Trump would become the oldest president ever elected. In December, Trump released a four-paragraph letter signed by Dr. Harold N. Bornstein of Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan that contained few specifics but declared that Trump would “be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
The 2012 episode led to a brief hospitalization for a blood clot in Clinton’s head. Details on Clinton’s condition were initially hard to come by, but her State Department office eventually provided extensive medical information.
Clinton wore special corrective glasses for some months afterward, and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, told an audience in 2014 that it had taken about six months for his wife to recover fully. Clinton herself has said she was surprised by the illness, because she had not experienced anything like it before.
Clinton’s campaign released a memo from her personal physician, Bardack, last summer, pronouncing the candidate healthy and suffering no lasting effects from the concussion.
The 2012 concussion caused concern among Clinton friends and supporters who hoped she would make a second run for the presidency, and some of whom predicted correctly that the episode would fuel speculation that Clinton was too frail to be commander in chief.
Her campaign dismisses any suggestion that the candidate is not up to the job, while suggesting that the speculation is an example of a sexist double standard not applied to male candidates.
Clinton is the first woman to become a major party nominee. The health questions come as she is attempting to present a more personal and direct appeal to voters that focuses on her credentials and background.
Clinton seemed upbeat and sometimes jovial as she engaged with reporters several times on her campaign plane last week. However, as rumors have mounted about Clinton’s health in recent weeks, her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, has inserted a short section into his speeches about how much stamina she has.
During a keynote address Saturday night at a Human Rights Campaign dinner, Kaine said he is “amazed when Donald Trump makes fun of Hillary Clinton’s stamina and energy because I got added to the ticket 100 days out, and I’m already getting lapped by her.”
“I can’t imagine the stamina and energy it takes to run this campaign for 18 months,” Kaine added. “This is one determined lady.”
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Sarah Dirkes, Jamie Relle, Caitlyn Cockran, and Elizabeth Ward were sitting at brunch at the Black Barn, a restaurant next door to Chelsea Clinton’s building, when they saw Hillary Clinton emerge at about 11:45 a.m.
“She looked fine,” said Ward, who was just finishing up her brunch.
“Great sunglasses,” added Dirkes.
A little girl also ran up to Clinton and asked for a photo with her. The Democratic nominee obliged, and waved to other brunchers at Black Barn before getting in a car and departing.
Gearan reported from Washington. Kayla Epstein and Philip Bump in New York and Jenna Johnson, Carol D. Leonnig and John Wagner in Washington contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...d=hp_hp-top-table-main_no-name:homepage/story
