Bill Clinton’s tough senior adviser Justin Cooper was mugged in Paris Wednesday by two young kids in broad daylight.
Cooper, who served as Clinton’s “body man” and most recently special adviser since Clinton left office, was in France at the same time the ex-president was in Paris for an AIDS conference organized by the international non-profit UNITAID.
Cooper was said to be withdrawing money across the street from the historic Hotel George V just off the Champs-Élysées when he was attacked. While Cooper was at the ATM, two boys said to be grade-school age approached.
As reported by the French newspaper Metro, one of the boys asked Cooper to sign a fake petition while the other one snatched 300 euros ($387) he’d withdrawn from the ATM. The youths, who were not carrying weapons during the attack, then ran off.
Metro reports that the perps are still at large, and video of the incident is being reviewed.
Cooper is a longtime close aide to the former president, and helped Clinton write several of his books, including his 957-page, 2004 memoir, “My Life.” Clinton thanked Cooper in the acknowledgments, saying, he “gave up more than two years of his young life to work with me every day and . . . all night.
“He never lost his patience, his energy never flagged and by the time we got to the last lap, he sometimes seemed to know me and what I wanted to say better than I did,” Clinton wrote.
Cooper is also a former employee of strategy group Teneo, run by Clinton adviser Doug Band and Declan Kelly, the former US special envoy to Northern Ireland.
Clinton on Wednesday spoke at a dinner for UNITAID, which uses innovative financing to increase funding for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis treatments in low-income countries.
A rep for the Clintons declined to comment on the incident.