Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned of a coming October surprise that will seek to "distort and pervert" Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential 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 during an interview on Friday with "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover"
As an example, Clinton pointed to the "pizzagate" conspiracy theory that gained traction in some online circles at the end of her presidential campaign against Donald Trump in 2016.
"Look, I mean, the crazy story about me running a child trafficking operation out of a basement of a pizzeria," Clinton said.
A North Carolina man who believed in the child sex trafficking conspiracy theory known as "pizzagate" opened fire on a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor in December 2016 as a result of the internet rumors.
The following year, then-U.S. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said the gunman's "ill-conceived plot" did "actual damage to the lives of real people," before handing down a four-year prison sentence for the attack.
Clinton's mention of the conspiracy theory evoked laughter from the crowd.
"Don't laugh," she said. "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."
"This is dangerous stuff," Clinton stressed. "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% coverage, and people believe it."
She then cautioned that the "digital airwaves" will be rife with misinformation in the run-up to this year's presidential election, which can take on a life of its own, and said the press needs to have a "consistent narrative" about the threat Trump poses to the country.
With regard to a story about Harris, Clinton said she doesn't "know what it's going to be," but said "it will be something," adding that "we'll have to work very, very hard to make sure that it is exposed as the lie that it is."
She also warned about the threat of disinformation on social media from adversaries like Russia, Iran and China, as they seek to influence the outcome of the election.