Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is “doing fine” after her abrupt departure from a memorial event last weekend, former President Bill Clinton assured journalist Charlie Rose on Monday.
“She’s doing fine, she was even better last night before she went to sleep,” Clinton told Rose during an interview that aired on PBS late Monday. “She had a good night’s sleep, she’s doing fine ... She just got dehydrated yesterday.”
The Clinton camp has been scrambling to address the incident at a September 11 memorial ceremony in New York City. Video footage taken at the event appears to show the candidate wobbling on her feat and being helped into a van, her feet dragging. Her doctors later announced she had been diagnosed with pneumonia last week, which Clinton did not publicly disclose.
Rose pressed her husband’s claims that she was only dehydrated, asking if there were any signs of something more “serious.”
“Well if it is, it’s a mystery to me and all of her doctors,” Bill Clinton replied, before noting that “frequently ― well not frequently, rarely ― but on more than one occasion, over the last many, many years, the same sort of thing happened to her when she got severely dehydrated.”
The former president assured Rose that his wife wouldn’t be gone for “weeks” ahead of the campaign trail, adding that she had been working “like a demon” and “had two-and-a-half hard days before the day she got dizzy.”
He noted after Sunday’s incident that he’d be “lucky to hold [his wife] back another day” after she cancelled a campaign trip meant to see her in California this week.
The former secretary of state has already come under fire for keeping her illness private from her media detail and all but her closest staffers.
“I just didn’t think it was going to be that big a deal,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
Both Clintons pointed to the unequal levels of scrutiny between the two leading candidates, noting Donald Trump had yet to release his tax returns and only provided cursory details about his health.
The Republican candidate promised on Monday to release some of his health records in the coming days.
