Remember President Donald Trump’s New York doctor, the one who looked like a mad scientist and was a gastroenterologist, who wrote a glowing letter in 2015 about Trump’s health and boasted, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”? Well, now he claims that the healthiest president ever had goons run up in his office and steal his medical records.
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,” Bornstein said, who described the incident as frightening.
Bornstein did get to keep the 8-by-10 photo of him and Trump, but it isn’t hanging on the wall; according to the news station, it’s now under a stack of papers on a bookshelf. Bornstein claims that the men who raided his office told him to take it down.
Bornstein said that the men didn’t even give him a medical-records release form—known as a HIPAA release—which is a violation of patient-privacy law. A person familiar with the matter told NBC News that now-former White House doctor Ronny Johnson wrote a letter asking for the president’s records, but it’s unknown whether a HIPAA release was attached.
Bornstein said that all of Trump’s charts and lab reports under both his name and his fake names were taken.
The White House did not immediately respond to NBC’s request for comment.
According to Bornstein, the beef between the two men grew after he told the New York Times that Trump takes Propecia, a drug that treats enlarged prostates and is often prescribed to stimulate hair growth in men. Bornstein also told the Times that Trump took medication for rosacea and high cholesterol, too.
Sounds like Bornstein didn’t understand patient confidentiality, and as such, Rhona Graff, Trump’s longtime assistant, reportedly contacted the doctor after the story appeared in the Times to inform him that he wasn’t going to be the White House physician.
“I couldn’t believe anybody was making a big deal out of a drug to grow his hair that seemed to be so important,” Bornstein told NBC News. “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?”
Trump is a man of little shame, but he will not have any doctor talking about the work he puts into maintaining his white-man conk—which, on windy days, can form into the shape of a Rorschach eagle.