Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a recent interview that Vice President Kamala Harris should expect efforts to “distort and pervert” her in the coming weeks.
The remarks from Clinton came while she appeared on “Firing Line,” calling back to her presidential campaign in 2016 and conspiracies that surfaced before the election.
“There will be concerted efforts to distort and pervert Kamala Harris, who she is, what she stands for, what she’s done,” Clinton said, pointing to the 2016 “pizzagate” conspiracy.
Clinton warned that similar conspiracies could soon pop up surrounding the vice president after seeing what happened to her.
“I mean, look, I mean, the crazy story about me running a child trafficking operation out of a basement of a pizzeria,” Clinton said, sparking some laughter from the crowd.
“Pizzagate” was a child sex trafficking conspiracy that alleged politicians were calling into a pizza shop and using codewords to obtain children who had been sex trafficked. The conspiracy got so big that it resulted in a North Carolina man opening fire in a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor in 2016.
While some chuckled at her mentioning of the conspiracy, Clinton told the crowd, “Don’t laugh.”
“It was a huge story. And it got one young man in North Carolina to get in his car with his, you know, assault rifle and drove up to liberate these nonexistent children and shoot up a pizzeria in Washington, D.C.,” Clinton said.
She went on to say that conspiracies and threats like Pizzagate are “dangerous stuff.”
“It starts online often on the dark web. It migrates. It’s picked up by the pro-Trump media. It’s then reported on by everybody else, which makes sure it has about 100 percent coverage, and people believe it,” Clinton said.
The former first lady went on to say that misinformation will fill “the digital airwaves” and that foreign adversaries like Russia, Iran, and China may look to fuel the fires.
While nothing about Harris has surfaced yet, she says she believes one is coming.
“So, I don’t know what it’s going to be,” Clinton said. “But it will be something, and we’ll have to work very, very hard to make sure that it is exposed as the lie that it is.”