NYT Reporter: Hillary Clinton's Minders Followed Me Into the Bathroom Every Single Time I Had to Go

Apparently -- this seems to me to be the only explanation -- they were determined to know the reporter's every movement (take that as you like) while she was covering a conference.

Matthew Continetti writes of a NYT reporter, Amy Chozick, who covers Clinton for the NYT. Chozick seems to be actually doing her job, and occasionally reporting things that Ready for Hillary! would prefer she didn't.

Chozick's latest piece concerned, mostly, her bathroom visits, or rather the attendance at her bathroom visits, which turned out to have a higher attendance than her usual crowd of One.

It seems Amy Chozick could not break away to relieve herself without being "escorted" to and from the bathroom, and sometimes, into the bathroom itself.

Every time she felt the urge [to go to the bathroom], a representative of the Clintons would accompany her to the ladies' room. Every time. And not only would the "friendly 20-something press aide" stroll with Chozick to the entrance of the john. She also "waited outside the stall." As though Chozick were a little girl.

Out.

Side.

The Stall.

It is creepy, embarrassing, and invasive to have a political minder eavesdropping on one's bodily evacuations.

If it was not embarrassing enough to be chaperoned to the water closet by a recent college graduate no doubt beaming with righteousness and an entirely undeserved and illusory sense of self-importance, some earnest and vacant and desperate-to-be-hip Millennial whose affiliation with the Clintons, whose involvement in their various schemes, consists of nothing more than her uniform of white shirt and silk scarf--if this was not on its own an indignity and an insult for a correspondent of the New York Times, when Chozick asked for comment on the bathroom police, she received the following response:

Craig Minassian, a spokesman for the initiative, directed me to a press release about American Standard's Flush for Good campaign to improve sanitation for three million people in the developing world. "Since you are so interested in bathrooms and [the Clinton Global Initiative],' Mr. Minassian said.

Oh, how adorable. The woman asked why she was being followed into the bathroom, and the spokesman said she was the one excessively interested in toilets.

She asked why she was being followed into the bathroom like an inmate on suicide watch at a psychiatric prison, and in response she got a snarky F**k You response.

Continetti notes that Choznick cannot do more here than report -- she cannot opine about what's going on here -- so Continetti steps up to do what Choznick's job forbids.

Corrected: The original headline suggested that Amy Choznick reported the motive for the bathroom-monitoring (to keep track of her every move).

In fact, this was my own gloss, not hers.

I have re-written to make it clear that this is my interpretation, not necessarily hers.

Though I don't know what contrary interpretation she could have.

posted by Ace at 05:24 PM

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