BRIAN STELTER (HOST): Let me ask you a question. If photographers followed you around every day for decades, would they come up with any embarrassing video of you? With that in mind, watch Sean Hannity spread conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton's health.
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SEAN HANNITY: What about some of the weird pauses she has, the coughing fits she has? There are moments when I'm literally watching her and I'm thinking, OK, the facial expressions are odd. They seem off.
MARC SIEGEL: Well, I don't know this because I'm only looking at a video but I saw the same video you saw and I'm wondering about a word called aphasia where you're searching for words, you suddenly lose those words, and that could be the sign, again, of some kind of traumatic brain injury or the after effects of a concussion.
[END VIDEO]
[BEGIN VIDEO]
HANNITY: Is it possible she had a stroke, or do you really believe it was a head injury, traumatic brain injury?
DANIEL KASSICIEH: I believe that she had a concussion with a possible brain injury. Of course I haven't seen the medical records.
[END VIDEO]
[BEGIN VIDEO]
HANNITY: Let me go back to this video, Dr. Siegel, that's on the screen now. We'll put it up again. I mean, it's a violent, violent, repetitive jerking of the head here. You can see, it's uncontrollable. Watch the reporter, like, pull back. The reporter got scared and she keeps doing it. What is that?
[END VIDEO]
STELTER: Let me be clear. That was reckless speculation by Sean Hannity. All of it. This whole “Clinton is secretly sick” thing has been promoted by conservative news sites for years. There's a grain of truth to the idea about her health because she did have a health scare in 2012. It was well-reported at the time. But her doctors say she is now physically fit to be president. There is no doubt about that. But Hannity is not interested in the truth about Clinton's health. If he was, he could have interviewed people who were actually there during the episodes that he's exploiting. Let's take the one at the very end. Hannity said Clinton was violently uncontrollably jerking her head. He said the reporter got scared. Sean, why not go ask the reporter? Go ask the reporter. The AP's Lisa Lerer wrote about this. She says Fox never contacted her and said she was never scared. Here's what she says really happened that day. Reporters were asking Clinton about a meeting with Elizabeth Warren. Lots of questions, lots of questions to ask. So Lerer writes, “Perhaps eager to avoid answering or maybe just taken aback by our volume, Clinton responded with an exaggerated motion, shaking her head vigorously for a few seconds.” Look, conspiracy theories are so much more interesting than the truth. But the last time I checked, Fox still has the word “News” in its name.
