Eyewitness Report on Mukasey [View All]

[Poiuyt]

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AG Mukasey was roughly twenty minutes into a speech defending the administration's torture policies and particularly arguing against prosecutions of people who made decisions in the aftermath of 9/11 (essentially arguing against what he believed amounted to the criminalization of policy differences).

Some seven or eight minutes prior to the incident a heckler start shouting, calling Mukasey a "tyrant." But the AG seemed unfazed by this; and members of the audience shouted the heckler down.

The eyewitness tells me that Mukasey seemed deeply in earnest about the argument he was making. And when he began to falter at first it appeared he was merely choking up. Soon, what at first appeared to be choking up blended into slurred words. And twenty to thirty seconds later he collapsed, his fall broken by a nearby FBI agent.

The room fell silent. After a moment there were shouts from the table where Mukasey's wife was sitting, calling to turn down the stage lights. A woman in an evening gown, presumably a doctor, ran up to the stage and the FBI agents hovering over Mukasey allowed her to attend to him.

The eyewitness told me that Mukasey collapsed at approximinately 10:06 and was taken off on a stretcher at approximately 10:33.

The one additional detail is that this eyewitness says that the medical personnel attending to Mukasey were talking to him for at least part of that period, at one point asking him "can you wiggle your toes." In other words, it appears that Mukasey did regain consciousness to at least some degree before being taken to the hospital.

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