Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton returns Thursday to the White House campaign fray after a few days at home recovering from pneumonia in a health scare that raised question marks on her ability to lead the country.
Her return to the political scene comes as New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said on Tuesday he had opened an inquiry into the Donald J. Trump Foundation to ensure the Republican presidential nominee’s charity was complying with state laws governing nonprofits.
Clinton’s spokesman Nick Merrill said in a statement late Tuesday that the former Secretary of State spent time at home “catching up on reading briefings, making calls,” and watching President Barack Obama’s rousing speech in Philadelphia, in which he offered unstinting praise of her.
The former first lady has just suffered perhaps the worst week of her 15-month quest to become the first female U.S. president.
She was forced to leave a 9/11 memorial event in New York on Sunday and was seen stumbling limp-legged into a Secret Service vehicle.
Clinton’s campaign initially said she had been suffering the ill effects of dehydration and “overheating.”
The 68-year-old since then has been sidelined from the campaign trail by a bout of pneumonia — an illness diagnosed Friday, before the 9/11 event, that has raised broader questions about her health.
Her Republican rival Donald Trump, 70, has questioned the former top diplomat’s fitness for the nation’s highest office as the race intensifies.
“While my opponent slanders you as deplorable and irredeemable, I call you hardworking American patriots who love your country and want a better future for all of our people,” Trump said in Iowa.
Obama, meanwhile, made his 2016 solo debut in support of Clinton, hitting out at “unfair” criticism of the Democratic presidential nominee.
After an extremely rough few days for Clinton, Obama used a fiery appearance before a crowd of 6,000 in Philadelphia to try to turn the tables on Trump.
Obama insisted that Clinton had “been subjected to more scrutiny and… more unfair criticism than anybody out here,” while accusing the media of giving her Republican opponent a pass.
Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Schneiderman, a supporter of Clinton, sued Trump and his now defunct Trump University for fraud in 2013, seeking $40 million in restitution plus penalties and other costs.
In a CNN interview on Tuesday, Schneiderman said his office had now brought the real estate mogul’s charitable foundation under scrutiny.
“My interest in this issue really is in my capacity as regulator of nonprofits in New York state. And we have been concerned that the Trump Foundation may have engaged in some impropriety from that point of view,” the elected Democratic official said.
He added: “We have been looking into the Trump Foundation to make sure it’s complying with the laws that govern charities in New York.” He did not elaborate on what wrongdoing Trump’s nonprofit might have committed.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung dismissed Schneiderman’s assertions as entirely motivated by presidential politics, calling the attorney general a “partisan hack who has turned a blind eye to the Clinton Foundation for years.”