Bennet Omalu, the famous pathologist who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of deceased American football players, made the disturbing claim on Twitter.
‘I must advise the Clinton campaign to perform toxicologic analysis of Ms Clinton’s blood,’ he wrote. ‘It is possible she is being poisoned.’
Then, in a second tweet, he added: ‘I do not trust Mr Putin and Mr Trump. With those two all things are possible.’
Trump has, in the past, expressed admiration for the Russian president – and his links to the Kremlin have been well documented.
And while Omalu’s warning was treated with more than a bit of scepticism in the replies – Putin has been accused of having his adversaries poisoned in the past.
Most prominently, an inquiry in January implicated Putin in the death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB operative who died in London in 2006.
“Secretary Clinton will not be traveling to California tomorrow or Tuesday,” spokesman Nick Merrill said, hours after the 68-year-old candidate abruptly left the Ground Zero memorial in New York suffering from dehydration.
The incident, in which a wobbly Clinton appeared to lose her footing as she was helped into her vehicle, offered Republican Donald Trump a new opening to attack his White House rival with just 15 days before their first high-pressure presidential debate.
Clinton had been seeking to bounce back from a blunder Friday, when she told donors that half of Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables” — so Sunday’s episode was certainly ill-timed.
The former secretary of state spent 90 minutes at the ceremony in lower Manhattan, greeting some relatives of those killed in the terror strikes 15 years ago, her campaign said in a statement. Clinton was a US senator for New York at the time of the attacks.