NY Post: Clinton team skipped ER yesterday in order to conceal her medical treatment

I noted this myself yesterday after the swoon heard ’round the world. On no planet does it make sense to bring a 68-year-old with pneumonia who’s just gone limp to her daughter’s apartment instead of to the ER. The only reason to do that is if you’re more worried about third parties examining her than you are about her condition.

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But what would the ER doctors and nurses have learned about her that the rest of us haven’t learned from the announcement that she has pneumonia? The most innocent explanation is that her team wasn’t planning to reveal the pneumonia, even after she had collapsed, and knew they’d have to disclose it to the ER doctors if she went to the hospital. They were going to go on keeping it a secret and were willing to deny her emergency treatment at first to do so. Then, hours later, they decided for whatever strategic reason that public disclosure would be the smart move after all. The less innocent explanation is that there’s something going on with Clinton’s health that’s even more ominous than pneumonia and under no circumstances will they risk disclosing that by involving doctors whom they don’t trust. The pneumonia revelation, in other words, could be a limited hangout designed to deflect the public from the even more terrible truth.

Hillary Clinton was headed to an emergency room following her sudden collapse during the Sept. 11 memorial ceremony — but ditched her NYPD escort and detoured to daughter Chelsea Clinton’s apartment to keep details of her medical treatment under wraps, The Post has learned.

Secret Service protocol called for the Democratic presidential nominee be taken to a state-designated Level I Trauma Center in the wake of her Sunday morning health crisis at Ground Zero, sources said.

But a campaign operative decided to change course to avoid treatment by doctors, nurses or other medical workers who could leak details to reporters, a source said.

Clinton’s van was supposed to be escorted by an NYPD protective detail, but the Secret Service whisked her away from Ground Zero before cops could accompany her, another source said.

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If there’s really nothing going on with Clinton more serious than pneumonia then this is a textbook example of how her weird obsession with secrecy makes political life harder for her. She could have announced the pneumonia on Friday and then gone straight to the ER yesterday after she swooned. The spin afterward would have been easy: “Even though she’s under the weather, Hillary couldn’t bear to miss a memorial for the victims of 9/11. She felt ill all morning but toughed it out and it finally caught up to her.” Instead she probably decided on Friday that she simply would not give Trump and his fans the satisfaction of her admitting that she really does have a somewhat serious health problem. Now you’ve got the Post running stories like this and people like me speculating about what sort of even more dreadful condition might be lurking in her medical records. It’s an elegant microcosm of what four years of Clinton in charge will be like. Even at a moment when the explanation for what’s going on with her should be believable and humanizing, her habit of needless secrecy turns it into a scandal. What a neat trait to have in a president!

Two clips for you here. The first is Christiane Amanpour somehow reducing media coverage of Clinton lying about her health, then passing out, then bypassing emergency treatment, and then belatedly disclosing her condition into some form of sexism. Hillary could fall through the podium at the first debate like Matt Foley collapsing onto a coffee table and Amanpour will be out there the next day riffing on how FDR must have fallen through his desk a hundred times. She ends up calling for less transparency about politicians’ health. That’s how far the media will go to protect Clinton. The second clip is Meghan McCain wondering, quite rightly, why a press that seemed to care so much about her father’s health didn’t care at all about Clinton’s until she had to be physically carried into a waiting van yesterday. Except she’s not really wondering. She knows very well why. Exit quotation: “if that were my dad in that video you would be telling him to drop out.”

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