An email released yesterday by Judicial Watch reveals that Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s closest aide at the State Department, warned that Hillary was “often confused.”  Dated January 26, 2013, the email came two months after the fall the former first lady suffered at her Chappaqua mansion.

That incident resulted in a brain injury so serious that she had to wear special glasses to correct double vision.

A month after her fall, the State Department officially claimed:

"Judging by the woman we saw this morning and the workload that she's got she seems to be fully recovered," spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters at a State Department briefing Jan. 7, 2013, about a month after Hillary Clinton's fall and concussion occurred.

That same day, State Department officials presented the secretary of state with a football helmet as a welcome-back gift.

Yet a month later, her closest associate, someone who spent far more time with her than her husband, warned that she was “often confused.”  So close are the two women, Huma and Hillary, that they sometimes wear outfits with matching colors.

They are very, very close associates:

So the question must be asked: has the American public been told the whole truth about the brain injury Hillary suffered?  Guy Benson at Townhall.com worries that criticism may backfire:

Some Clinton critics may point to this email as evidence that Clinton is not physically or mentally up for the job, but as I wrote when this issue arose last spring, that charge won't stick unless voters actually see some evidence of her alleged fragility.  She may have sighed her way through serious questions and damning new revelations at the recent Benghazi hearings, but she didn't look the least bit disoriented or erratic over those many hours of grueling testimony.  And she may have served up some horrible answers at Saturday's debate, but those were more readily attributable to her weak political instincts than anything else. In fact, speculative questions about Hillary's fitness for office would likely be welcomed by her identity politics-driven campaign, which will feature a nasty festival of motive-impugning victimhood.  Better to accurately portray her as an out-of-touch, polarizing creature of the past than an infirm old lady.

Bill Clinton later claimed that the injury required six months to heal.

The former president revealed that his wife's injury "required six months of very serious work to get over," he said during a question-and-answer session at the Peterson Foundation in Washington.

"They went to all this trouble to say she had staged what was a terrible concussion that required six months of very serious work to get over," he said. "It's something she never low-balled with the American people, never tried to pretend it didn't happen."

But of course, Victoria Nuland’s statement did exactly that: low-balled the injury.  So it is clear that the American people were deceived about her impairment.

As the presidential candidacy of John McCain revealed, age and potential infirmity – even if suffered in the course of being a prisoner of war – do rank as legitimate concerns in the eyes of many Democrats.

The best way for the GOP to play this is to remind voters that they were deceived by Hillary’s team in the wake of the serious brain injury she suffered, and to worry about whether she is up to the strain of the office of the presidency.