Journalist Kara Swisher has shut down what she called “nonsense” claims that Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor and Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman couldn’t follow conversations following his stroke earlier this year.
Dasha Burns of NBC News spoke to Mr Fetterman and said that “because of his stroke” the Democrat’s “campaign required closed captioning technology for this interview to essentially read our questions as we asked them. And ... in small talk before the interview without captioning, it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation”.
Ms Swisher rejected this notion.
“Sorry to say but I talked to @JohnFetterman for over an hour without stop or any aides and this is just nonsense. Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk,” Ms Swisher, who hosts a podcast, tweeted on Tuesday evening.
“Listen to the interview in which we did not edit the ums or ahs out as we typically do for everyone else. There were few slips — I had more — and at no moment did he seem distracted,” she added, linking to the episode of her podcast, On with Kara Swisher, featuring Mr Fetterman.
“Lastly the most irksome thing for me when I had a stroke in 2011 is all Dr. Google folks who kept trying to give me advice (’Slow down,’ they’d say; ‘F*** you,’ I’d reply) or study my speech for signs of trouble. It is a slow recovery but many younger people do just fine,” Ms Swisher wrote.
“Btw 11 years later, I still fear another, even tho anyone can die at any moment of anything at all. That’s why I’m getting heart surgery soon — the medical strides related to strokes are impressive — to close the hole there that caused it,” she added.
The podcast host retweeted a post by another user saying that “we have two sitting members [of] Congress that had strokes in this past year- both are back working without issue. This whole concern and the trumped up stories are a GOP attempt to cause concern that it not real”.
Mr Fetterman is going up against GOP nominee and TV personality Dr Oz in November.
