Hillary Clinton's decision to keep her health issues a secret didn't come from any kind of penchant for privacy, but rather from a penchant for secrecy, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Tuesday.
"Deleting 30,000 emails is a function of secrecy," Gingrich, a supporter of GOP nominee Donald Trump, told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. "She lives in a world in which secrecy and dishonesty are the hallmarks, having her staff routinely lie about her health fits, her staff lying about everything else. Why would they start telling the truth now?"
He noted that newsman Tom Brokaw has offered Clinton some "very good advice" that she won't take, that she needs a "very serious medical work-up to find out what's going on."
But Sunday's incident, in which Clinton became faint and had to leave a 9/11 commemoration in New York City, forced the campaign to announce she'd been diagnosed with pneumonia two days ago, and Gingrich said that wasn't an isolated incident.
"If that had been the only thing that had happened on Sunday, her collapse, people wouldn't be rushing to this level of concern," said Gingrich. "It's the duality that they have been secret about everything and they have been stifling the news media, so liberal reporters are even getting irritated.
"At the same time she's had a series of health incidents that when they accumulate, you begin to go, what's going on here?"
Gingrich said he's known Clinton for 24 years, and she is in his prayers and he hopes her health is fine, but at the same time, running for the presidency "isn't like running for the U.S. Senate or governor."
"The president of the United States, every single day for their entire presidency is at the forefront of protecting this country, and you don't know in a given morning what's going to happen," Gingrich said. "She, after all, is the person who ran the 3:00 a.m. telephone call ad as an attack on Barack Obama in 2008."
Someone could take her ad and run it now and say "gee, we're not sure if she's going to be available either because she's busy doing something secret or because she has a health problem or she can't remember. Look at her FBI interview when she kept saying I couldn't remember because of the concussion," he continued.
"That doesn't encourage you to think that at 3:00 in the morning she's going to instantaneously know what she's doing, and I think that's the — that's the challenge she has to meet."
Gingrich also addressed Clinton's "basket of deplorables" comments, telling the show that he was in Georgia on Monday and three women walked up wearing "deplorables" t-shirts.
"If you look at the list of what she describes as deplorable, it tells you the Democratic Party's desperation," said Gingrich. "You go to Detroit and you go to Milwaukee and you say — you really want to help people, and you must be a racist. You try to protect the country from potential terrorists coming in, you must be the Islamophobic or xenophobic. It's an absurdity."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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