Aide reached out to NFL commish after Clinton head injury

A longtime Hillary Clinton aide reached out to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) after the former secretary of State sustained a head injury in late 2012.

“[S]peaking of your cracked head, I reached out to both the Nfl commish (I remembered that his dad held your Senate seat) and Bill Frist,” longtime aide Philippe Reines told Clinton in an email on Christmas Eve of 2012. 

Reines reached out to the two men “to undermine the John Boltons [sic] and Laura Ingraham’s of the world who are belittling your health,” he added, in emails released on Monday evening.

{mosads}Bolton — the former United Nations ambassador — and Ingraham are both popular conservative pundits who claimed that Clinton was faking sick to avoid testifying in Congress about the terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, earlier that year. 

Clinton had been suffering from a stomach virus that month, and sustained a concussion when she fainted. Subsequent tests detected a blood clot between her skull and brain, which sent her to a New York hospital for three days around New Year’s.

Reines wrote a message to both Bolton and Ingraham scolding them for their remarks, he told Clinton.

“Don’t worry, no profanity,” wrote Reines, who is known for his caustic tone with reporters. “Not that kind of note. Just not letting these comments stand, no matter who says them.”

“As always, thanks for defending me, my friend,” Clinton told him. 

Emails released by the State Department do not contain a response from Goodell, whose father, Charles, spent a term as a Republican senator from New York.

Frist, however, responded enthusiastically to Reines’s request.

“I love her and respect her and I can help,” Frist, a former surgeon, wrote to Reines. “Not sure how exactly [but] I know I can help. I will Keep all Confidential.”

Reines told Clinton that he had “a few ideas” for how Frist could be of assistance, but declined to discuss them in the email.