Hillary Clinton is admitting some grudging respect for one of the strangest and most dangerous conspiracy theories she was targeted by: Pizzagate.
In an interview with Kara Swisher posted on Wednesday, the former first lady and secretary of state commented on some of the political attacks she faced while running for president in 2016.
Clinton noted that online ads with memes and conspiracies were “really effective” at hurting her campaign.
“Facebook was the worst offender against me, and Pizzagate, which was just a huge lie that took off,” she said.
For those with short memories, Pizzagate was the name given to an unsubstantiated claim that Clinton and campaign chairman John Podesta secretly ran a child sex ring in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant.
To be clear: The conspiracy was baseless ― Comet Ping Pong doesn’t even have a basement ― but that didn’t stop people from taking it seriously. One North Carolina man, Edgar Maddison Welch, shot up the restaurant in December 2016, hoping to save the kids he believed were trapped in the nonexistent basement.
But baseless and false doesn’t mean ineffective, and Clinton admitted her campaign was “frankly ill-prepared, unaware of how effective it could be.”
She added:
“I think Pizzagate was really effective when people used these ads against me. These really terrible, horrible, false claims about me were running all over the internet, some with Russian money, for heaven’s sakes.”
Clinton said that her staffers and volunteers were on the front lines of dealing with the Pizzagate claims.
“The people who were campaigning for me, they were on the phones, they were knocking on doors, they would have voters say, ‘You know what? I can’t vote for her because she kills people, or she traffics children,’ or whatever they were told and that they believed.”
“And when, you know, my supporters would say, ‘Where did you hear that? It’s not true.’ They’d say, ‘Oh, I saw it on the internet,’” she added.
Clinton admitted that “the naivete and the susceptibility of people seeing a video or seeing something in print that looked legitimate was so powerful.” She insisted that’s why “people can’t count out all of the money” that is being spent in the current election cycle to lie about Democratic candidates again.
You can see the complete interview below, with Clinton’s Pizzagate comments starting around the 53-minute mark.