So the Clinton campaign, out to conceal the candidates’s illness, forced the Secret Service to break protocol and avoid the emergency room after her near-collapse Sunday.
This is one determined bunch of liars.
First, her team says nothing as it sneaks her from the 9/11 ceremony — after she nearly collapses. It later claims she was “overheated” and parades her outside her daughter’s place, where she claims she feels “much better.”
And has the candidate — a possibly infectious pneumonia case — hug a child to make the lie seem cute.
It adds up to hours of effort to deceive — even enlisting federal officers in the effort. That’s the bottom line of The Post’s scoop, thanks to sources who revealed that she was headed to the ER, as Secret Service protocols demand — until her staff insisted otherwise, for fear hospital staff might leak word of her illness.
It seems Team Hillary saw the risk of disclosure as worse than the risk to her health.
Only when their lies didn’t stop the questions did the Clinton camp announce that she’d been diagnosed with pneumonia — last Friday.
Heck, sending her to the 9/11 ceremonies in the first place — rather than admitting she had a common enough ailment — was a bid to deceive. Her doctor had ordered rest.
So what if Clinton now promises “additional medical information” in the coming days? At this point, it’s impossible to believe she’ll ever provide a full and honest picture of her health.
If not for the video of her near-fall Sunday, her folks would’ve kept lying. Even then, it took them hours to tell the truth.
Or part of it. Clinton’s odd stiffness in the video, among other things, suggests more than pneumonia may be at play. The concussion and cranial blood clot she suffered in late 2012 sidelined her for six months. Are those issues truly resolved?
Dishonesty is her first instinct. After all, she answered federal orders to preserve her records by having her emails wiped clean with BleachBit and her hard drives smashed with a hammer.
And much of the press helped her hide her health woes after her recent coughing fits: CNN called those asking questions “the new birthers” and claimed to “debunk” the “conspiracy” theories. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza raged at the “conspiracy theorists.” Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert mocked concerns.
Funny: Those asking questions, from Donald Trump to Matt Drudge to our own Michael Goodwin, turned out to be right.
Like Trump, we wish Clinton a speedy recovery from this illness. Too bad she’ll never get over her Pinocchio syndrome.