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Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton revisited the video showing her appearing to stagger and nearly faint after a 9/11 commemoration ceremony in 2016, conceding on Wednesday that campaigning while having pneumonia was a “mistake.”
The former secretary of state spoke to Kara Swisher on their new joint podcast about Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico’s nine-day absence from the campaign trail after he said he contracted the flu.
His absence from public appearances led to a viral online rumor wrongly alleging that he had secretly been admitted to an Ohio mental health facility, which Clinton and Swisher said was “easily disproven.”
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Hillary Clinton recalled the viral 2016 video of her nearly fainting when she was ill at the 9/11 memorial that year in New York. (Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Clinton compared Talarico’s experience to her own after the 2016 video went viral as she ran for president, arguing that critics portrayed her as being “on death’s door.” Swisher said that President Donald Trump was “quantumly sicker” than Clinton had been, though “they hide it,” and asked Clinton to respond.
“They tested me and they said, ‘Oh, you’ve got pneumonia. You need to take like five or six days off.’ I said, ‘I can’t do that.’ And my doctor said, ‘Well, that’s what you should do.’ And I thought, ‘Well, yeah, that’s what I should do.’ But I’m campaigning and I have to show up on 9/11 because it means a lot to me since, as you know, I was a senator [during the attacks]. So, I kept going, which was a mistake,” Clinton recalled.
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She added, “They did have the video of me struggling to get to the car to be able to, you know, take some breaths and recover myself. From my perspective, it worked because it was just papering social media, papering traditional media. ‘I was dying. I was lying about my health.’ This is from a guy who has never given us an honest medical report ever. Ever.”
Hillary Clinton’s campaign revealed that the former first lady was fighting pneumonia at the time she nearly fainted during the 9/11 memorial in 2016. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)
Fox News Digital reached out to Clinton’s team for comment.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said Clinton should think about moving on from the 2016 election.
“President Trump’s sharpness, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to what we saw during the last administration, when Democrats and the legacy media intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people,” Ingle told Fox News Digital. “President Trump is working nonstop to solve problems and deliver on his promises, and he remains in excellent health. Meanwhile, Crooked Hillary Clinton is still whining about her spectacular 2016 election defeat. It’s time for Hillary to move on.”
According to a law enforcement source at the time, Clinton was described as “clearly having some type of medical episode” as she appeared to fall on her way to a van and required help from security. Clinton’s campaign later released a statement confirming that she was fighting pneumonia and “felt overheated” at the time.
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Hillary Clinton received backlash for hiding her condition from the press. (Dominik Bindl/Getty Images)
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Clinton and her campaign faced criticism from members of the press for failing to disclose her pneumonia diagnosis sooner and for their handling of media inquiries at the time.