Back in December 2015, the Trump campaign released a letter from the candidate’s longtime personal physician that, among other things, claimed that Trump would be the “healthiest person ever elected President” along with other wording that, nearly everyone agreed, certainly didn’t sound like it had been written by a medical doctor. Now, more than two years later, that same doctor is saying that the text of that letter was dictated to him by the then-candidate:
When Dr. Harold Bornstein described in hyperbolic prose then-candidate Donald Trump’s health in 2015, the language he used was eerily similar to the style preferred by his patient.
It turns out the patient himself wrote it, according to Bornstein.
“He dictated that whole letter. I didn’t write that letter,” Bornstein told CNN on Tuesday. “I just made it up as I went along.”
The admission is an about face from his answer more than two years when the letter was released and answers one of the lingering questions about the last presidential election. The letter thrust the eccentric Bornstein, with his shoulder-length hair and round eyeglasses, into public view.
“His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary,” he crowed in the letter, which was released by Trump’s campaign in December 2015. “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
The missive didn’t offer much medical evidence for those claims beyond citing a blood pressure of 110/65, described by Bornstein as “astonishingly excellent.” It claimed Trump had lost 15 pounds over the preceding year. And it described his cardiovascular health as “excellent.”
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment about Bornstein’s claim.
In a separate report, Bornstein is describing a somewhat odd incident that took place after the President took office:
In February 2017, a top White House aide who was Trump’s longtime personal bodyguard, along with the top lawyer at the Trump Organization and a third man, showed up at the office of Trump’s New York doctor without notice and took all the president’s medical records.
The incident, which Dr. Harold Bornstein described as a “raid,” took place two days after Bornstein told a newspaper that he had prescribed a hair growth medicine for the president for years.
In an exclusive interview in his Park Avenue office, Bornstein told NBC News that he felt “raped, frightened and sad” when Keith Schiller and another “large man” came to his office to collect the president’s records on the morning of Feb. 3, 2017. At the time, Schiller, who had long worked as Trump’s bodyguard, was serving as director of Oval Office operations at the White House.
“They must have been here for 25 or 30 minutes. It created a lot of chaos,” said Bornstein, who described the incident as frightening.
A framed 8-by-10 photo of Bornstein and Trump that had been hanging on the wall in the waiting room now lies flat under a stack of papers on the top shelf of Bornstein’s bookshelf. Bornstein said the men asked him to take it off the wall.
Bornstein said he was not given a form authorizing the release of the records and signed by the president known as a HIPAA release — which is a violation of patient privacy law. A person familiar with the matter said there was a letter to Bornstein from then-White House doctor Ronny Jackson, but didn’t know if there was a release form attached.
“If Ronny Jackson was the treating doctor, and he was asking for his patient’s paperwork, a doctor is obligated to give it to him to ensure continuity of care,” said NBC News medical correspondent Dr. John Torres, “but it has to be given in a secure fashion. Nobody who doesn’t have HIPAA clearance can see the patient records.”
NBC News legal analyst Danny Cevallos said that patients generally own their medical information, but the original record is the property of the provider. “New York state law requires that a doctor maintain records for at least six years, so a doctor who hands over his original records runs the risk of violating New York state law,” said Cevallos.
Bornstein said the original and only copy of Trump’s charts, including lab reports under Trump’s name as well as under the pseudonyms his office used for Trump, were taken.
Another man, Trump Organization chief legal officer Alan Garten, joined Schiller’s team at Bornstein’s office, and Bornstein’s wife, Melissa, photocopied his business card. Garten declined to comment for this article.
Schiller, who left the White House in September 2017, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Asked about the incident by Hallie Jackson of NBC News on Tuesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that taking possession of medical records was “standard operating procedure for a new president” and that it was not accurate to characterize what happened as a “raid.”
“If Ronny Jackson was the treating doctor, and he was asking for his patient’s paperwork, a doctor is obligated to give it to him to ensure continuity of care,” said NBC News medical correspondent Dr. John Torres, “but it has to be given in a secure fashion. Nobody who doesn’t have HIPAA clearance can see the patient records.”
NBC News legal analyst Danny Cevallos said that patients generally own their medical information, but the original record is the property of the provider. “New York state law requires that a doctor maintain records for at least six years, so a doctor who hands over his original records runs the risk of violating New York state law,” said Cevallos.
Bornstein said the original and only copy of Trump’s charts, including lab reports under Trump’s name as well as under the pseudonyms his office used for Trump, were taken.
Another man, Trump Organization chief legal officer Alan Garten, joined Schiller’s team at Bornstein’s office, and Bornstein’s wife, Melissa, photocopied his business card. Garten declined to comment for this article.
(…)
Bornstein said that Trump cut ties with him after he told The New York Times that Trump takes Propecia, a drug for enlarged prostates that is often prescribed to stimulate hair growth in men. Bornstein told the Times that he prescribed Trump drugs for rosacea and high cholesterol as well
The story also quotes Bornstein recalling that he had told Rhona Graff, Trump’s longtime assistant, “You know, I should be the White House physician.”
After the article ran on Feb. 1, 2017, Bornstein said Graff called him and said, “So you wanted to be the White House doctor? Forget it, you’re out.’ ”
Two days after the article ran, the men came to his office.
“I couldn’t believe anybody was making a big deal out of a drug to grow his hair that seemed to be so important. And it certainly was not a breach of medical trust to tell somebody they take Propecia to grow their hair. What’s the matter with that?”
To be completely frank about it, Dr. Bornstein doesn’t come across as the most credible person in his own right. He didn’t in December 2015 when that health letter was released and he doesn’t come across any differently now. I guess the reason I say that is mostly because he’s just, well, weird and doesn’t act at all the way you’d expect a doctor to act. The best example of that, of course, was the original letter, which pretty much everyone had assumed had been dictated in some form or another by Trump. A normal physicians letter describing a patients health status quite simply doesn’t normally read the way that Bornstein’s December 2015 letter did, and in interviews that Bornstein granted around the time the letter was released, he just seemed like an odd guy. There are other examples of odd behavior on the part of Bornstein that makes one wonder how he ended up being the personal physician to someone like Trump. For example, telling reporters that he had prescribed Propecia or any other medication for Trump would seem to me to be a clear violation of HIPAA privacy protections that forbid medical providers from discussing a patient’s private medical information. If Trump didn’t give Bornstein permission to discuss those matters, then he could have some serious legal and ethical issues to deal with.
As for the report about the circumstances regarding the manner in which Trump took custody of his medical file, that too comes across as rather strange. It’s generally true that a patient owns the medical records that a physician keeps regarding their treatment, the manner in which those records are turned over is usually conducted far differently than the manner in which Bornstein described what happened in this case. For one thing, it’s typically required that the treating physician is given a copy of a signed release from the patient authorizing the release of the records to whoever is requesting them, even if that person is another doctor. It doesn’t appear that this was done in this case. Second, the doctor is typically given the opportunity to make copies for his own records since most states require doctors to maintain copies of patient files for a set number of years. In this case, Bornstein was apparently not given an opportunity to make those copies and now has no copy of Trump’s files for his own records, potentially exposing him to a violation of state law.
Like so many things surrounding this President, this is just not normal.
