By GARRICK FELDMAN
Leader executive editor
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump said this week they will release “detailed medical records” amid rumors about Hillary’s health, especially in the wake of her near-fainting spell at Sunday’s 9/11 ceremony in New York.
She said she’s been suffering from pneumonia for several days, and she appears to be on the mend.
The Internet is filled with conspiracy theories about her health, but also about Trump, whose doctor last December released an embarrassingly fulsome medical report that described him as the healthiest presidential candidate in history.
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s name inevitably figures in some of the most prominent conspiracy theories. Putin, who has been killing his opponents for decades, hates Clinton and admires Trump. Putin has called Trump “colorful,” and Trump has returned the compliment by calling Putin “a great leader.”
Putin’s critics who are familiar with his poisoning opponents, think he’s trying to harm Clinton.
Dr. Bennet Omalu, the American physician who connected head injuries in football players to degenerative brain disease, is convinced Putin is out to harm Clinton.
“I do not trust Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. With these two all things are possible," he tweeted.
“I must advice (sic) the Clinton campaign to perform toxicological analysis of Ms. Clinton’s blood. It is possible she is being poisoned.”
In 2006, Putin’s agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko, who had defected from the Federal Security Service (the successor to the dreaded KGB, where Putin served as an officer). They brought polonium from a Russian nuclear plant and put the poison in Litvinenko’s tea in a London restaurant. He fell ill suddenly and died three weeks later.
Putin’s agents also poisoned former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko during his re-election campaign in 2004. They put dioxin in his food. Yushchenko survived, but is disfigured for life.
Putin is a menace to his own people and the rest of the world. He has protected Syrian dictator Assad and has protected drug cartels in St. Petersburg, where he was vice mayor before he became president.
He almost certainly ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails.
He has reasons to wish Clinton were incapacitated. He probably has a thick file on Hillary and Trump as well. Why Trump thinks so highly of the tiny dictator is a mystery.
But beyond medical records, Trump should follow Clinton’s example and release 10 years worth of financial records and tax returns, including the work of his foundation. A co-founder of LinkedIn says he’ll give a veterans group $5 million if Trump releases his tax returns.
Sketchy records uncovered by the Washington Post show the foundation has not received any money from Trump in more than a decade.
The Post says Trump has used other people's money to pay for a handful of charities, but more seriously, the foundation has made political donations in violation of IRS rules.
The foundation recently paid a $2,500 fine after it made an improper $25,000 gift to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who called off an investigation of Trump University, which has been accused of defrauding participants in the real estate seminar out of millions of dollars.
Some naïve participants paid as much as $35,000 hoping to learn about Trump’s real estate secrets.
The presidential campaign will get nastier, but foreigners like Putin must be warned to stay out of our politics.
We have a long dossier on him, thanks to Litvinenko: Putin ordered the bombings of apartment buildings in 1999 in Russia, where nearly 300 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured.
Chechen rebels were blamed for the attacks, but Russian scholars believe it was Putin’s Federal Security Service that carried out the bombings to whip up support for a war against Chechnya.
Local police arrested several FSB agents planting bombs at one of the apartment buildings but were later released.
According to Litvinenko, Putin is also a known pedophile. He has looted an estimated $40 billion from the Russian people.
If Putin wants an oligarch’s McMansion, he tells him to move out and he should be glad he wasn’t poisoned.
Others have not been so lucky.
