Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is keeping severe health problems from the public out of fear that they could disqualify her from becoming president, according to a new book.
{mosads}Author Ed Klein writes in Blood Feud, due out this week, that doctors at New York-Presbyterian Hospital diagnosed Clinton with several problems, after she fainted at the State Department in late 2012, according to excerpts published late Sunday on the Drudge Report.
“She had a right transverse venous thrombosis, or a blood clot between her brain and skull. She had developed the clot in one of the veins that drains blood from the brain to the heart. The doctors explained that blood stagnates when you spend a lot of time on airplanes, and Hillary had clocked countless hours flying around the world,” Klein writes, according to the excerpts.
Clinton had an “intrinsic tendency to form clots and faint” Klein added, citing fainting spells in Buffalo and Yemen and “other unspecified fainting episodes.”
The fainting spells indicated there was an underlying heart problem, Klein writes, adding that a cardiac stress test “indicated that her heart rhythm and heart valves were not normal.”
Klein wrote that sources were told that Clinton’s doctors considered performing valve-replacement surgery. That option was ultimately rejected, Klein writes, but former President Bill Clinton was warned that Hillary Clinton “has to be carefully monitored for the rest of her life.”
Hillary Clinton is considered the Democratic front-runner for president in 2016 if she decides to run.
The State Department in late 2012 said she had fainted and suffered a concussion.
“While suffering from a stomach virus, Secretary Clinton became dehydrated and fainted, sustaining a concussion,” Deputy Assistant Secretary Philippe Reines said in a statement at the time.
The incident delayed her testimony before Congress about the investigation into the deaths of four Americans at the U.S. diplomatic annex in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.
Klein stirred controversy in 2012, writing in The Amateur that an Obama administration official and former President Clinton urged Hillary Clinton to replace Vice President Biden on the Democratic ticket.
The press secretary for President Obama’s reelection campaign panned the report, saying there was never any effort to replace Biden with Clinton.