Top Aide in 2013 Email: Hillary is 'Often Confused'

Eyebrows, raised -- via The Hill:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was “often confused,” according to a 2013 email from her longtime aide Huma Abedin. The comment, which is likely to attract attention from Clinton’s critics on the presidential campaign trail, was revealed on Monday following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from conservative legal group Judicial Watch. In the Jan. 26, 2013, message, Abedin gave the note about Clinton while discussing the secretary’s schedule with another Clinton aide, Monica Hanley. “Have you been going over calls with her for tomorrow?” Abedin asked Hanley. “So she knows [then-Indian Prime Minister Manmohan] singh is at 8?” “She was in bed for a nap by the time I heard that she had an 8am call,” Hanley responded. “Will go over with her.” “Very imp to do that,” Abedin said in response. “She’s often confused.”

The email was sent to Abedin via the email address that she kept on Clinton’s personal server. The message was unclassified but contained a detailed itinerary of Clinton’s schedule for the day, which Judicial Watch worried could amount to a breach of security. By keeping the schedule on what appeared to be an unsecured server, the group said, Clinton exposed herself to unnecessary risk.

Important context: That email was sent in late January 2013, almost two months after Mrs. Clinton suffered a serious concussion, having fainted and fallen in her home. Her husband has said that the after-effects of this medical incident took half-a-year of "very serious work" to overcome. For a time, the former Secretary of State wore special glasses to help mitigate symptoms such as blurred vision, headaches and dizziness. So the easy explanation for Clinton's apparently frequent confusion at the time was that she was still in the process of getting over a fairly traumatic event that took a significant but temporary toll on some of her faculties. Some Clinton critics may point to this email as evidence that Clinton is not physically or mentally up for the job, but as I wrote when this issue arose last spring, that charge won't stick unless voters actually see some evidence of her alleged fragility. She may have sighed her way through serious questions and damning new revelations at the recent Benghazi hearings, but she didn't look the least bit disoriented or erratic over those many hours of grueling testimony. And she may have served up some

horrible answers at Saturday's debate, but those were more readily attributable to her weak political instincts than anything else. In fact, speculative questions about Hillary's fitness for office would likely be welcomed by her identity politics-driven campaign, which will feature a nasty festival of motive-impugning victimhood. Better to accurately portray her as an out-of-touch, polarizing creature of the past than an infirm old lady. I'll leave you with this classy little flashback:

Lobbing cheap shots at aging Republican white guys is totally kosher, obviously, but Her Majesty mustn't be subjected to the same standard. War on women, etc. In case you were curious, an array of celebrities helped Hillary Clinton celebrate her 68th birthday last month. If elected, she would be pushing 70 upon her inauguration.