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In July 2015, Hillary Clinton's personal physician, Dr. Lisa Bardack, issued a public letter affirming that the candidate is in excellent condition and fit to serve as President of the United States. Presidential candidates typically have their doctors release such statements, but this instance was particularly noteworthy because the Democratic presidential nominee has been beset by unfounded rumors holding that she is prone to seizures and is concealing some serious neurological condition. In August 2016, someone issued a hoax leak of purported medical records from Dr. Bardack supposedly documenting that, contrary to what the physician had asserted in public, Hillary Clinton was experiencing more frequent seizures and showed signs of advancing dementia. Shortly afterwards, the notorious conspiracy-pushing outlet WhatDoesItMean.com published a fabricated article reporting that Vincent Fleck, the father of the doctor treating [Hillary Clinton] for dementia and the leaker of those records, had died under mysterious circumstances: It is true that news accounts reported the death of a Vincent Fleck of Mount Kisco, who passed away from drowning or a medical event suffered while competing in a triathalon in early August 2016. However, all the rest of the story about a CIA hit team finding a dead man’s switch on Vincent Fleck's computer is a fabrication, as is the claim about Dr. Daniel Fleck's treating Hillary Clinton for dementia. (It's rather unlikely a physical therapist with a regular practice specializing in sports injuries would be furtively treating a high-profile politician campaigning throughout the country for dementia.) As reflected in the example tweets reproduced above, many readers inferred that Dr. Daniel Fleck himself had died mysteriously, but we confirmed with a beleaguered employee at his practice (beset with phone calls about the conspiracy rumors) that the physician was alive and well. Vincent Fleck was the fourth individual connected to Clinton by WhatDoesItMean.com as part of a series of fabrications suggesting people who posed risks to Clinton's power were being serially murdered. Previously, the outlet falsely claimed hacker Guccifer (Marcel Lazăr Lehel) was missing and presumed dead after he purportedly hacked into Clinton's e-mail, and claimed former UN official John Ashe was murdered on the eve of scheduled testimony against Clinton. The site also used the tragic unsolved murder of Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich to germinate a baseless conspiracy theory that ultimately caused the young man's family additional sorrow in an already harrowing period of grief. Guccifer was confirmed alive and well by officials at the facility in which he was housed, and a federal prosecutor's office affirmed Ashe's legal troubles were in no way connected to Clinton. Rich's murder remains unsolved, but his family has pled with the public not to engage in painful speculation about the circumstances of his killing. All four rumors were started by a blogger known by the nom de plume Sorcha Faal. RationalWiki says of Faal's sensational and outrageous WhatDoesItMean.com conspiracy site that: Before the recent series of Clinton-related fabrications,Sorcha Faal claimed President Obama had ordered the military to attack the city of Charleston with nuclear weapons (which didn't happen), Rear Admiral Rick Williams was fired because he revealed Obama's purchase of a mansion in Dubai (Williams was terminated for misconduct), and Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama were engaged in a potentially conflict-starting dispute over the practices of Monsanto.
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