The Pizzagate story was baseless and the pizzeria had no basement, yet volunteers for Hillary Clinton kept running into voters who believed every word of it.
Clinton, the former first lady and secretary of state, named Pizzagate when she was asked on the “On with Kara Swisher” podcast whether any single falsehood aimed at her during the 2016 campaign had been especially shocking. The episode, hosted by journalist Kara Swisher, was published Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026.
“I think Pizzagate was really effective when people, you know, when 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.
Facebook Was the Worst Offender
The attacks that bit hardest, she said, did not come from television commercials. They came from the internet.
“Facebook was the worst offender against me, and Pizzagate, which was just a huge lie that took off,” she told Swisher.
There were too many of them to list, Clinton said. A decade on, she described a campaign that had no plan for the problem and no sense of how much damage material like that could do to a candidate’s standing with ordinary voters.
The Man Who Brought a Rifle
Pizzagate held that Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, were secretly running a child sex ring out of the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C.
Comet Ping Pong does not have a basement. The claim still traveled, and in December 2016 a North Carolina man, Edgar Maddison Welch, fired a rifle inside the restaurant while trying to free the children he believed were being held there. Welch was sentenced to four years in prison.
What Volunteers Heard at the Door
The people who absorbed the rumor face to face were the ones working for her, Clinton said. Staffers and volunteers manned the phones and knocked on doors, and voters told them flatly that they could not support her because she killed people, or because she trafficked children — whatever version had reached them, and whatever they had come to believe.
When her supporters pushed back and asked where the story had come from, Clinton said, the answer was the same: the internet.
What made it work, she said, was how readily people trusted a video or a printed item simply because it carried the look of something legitimate.
A Mother in an Ohio Ad
Clinton arrived at the 2016 material by way of Ohio. She was asked about a campaign ad from Vivek Ramaswamy in the state’s governor’s race that features Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of his opponent, Amy Acton. In the spot, Arthur calls her daughter a liar and tells voters not to elect her.
Acton has said she was removed from her mother’s custody at age 12, after her stepfather was indicted on charges of raping her.
Clinton decried the ad, adding her voice to bipartisan criticism of it, and warned that political spots, online hoaxes and invented stories can knock a campaign off course. Then she reached back 10 years for her own example.
The podcast appearance is the latest in a run of public criticism Clinton has aimed at the Trump administration. In August 2026, she likened President Trump’s gold renovations at the White House to the palaces of the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, where she said she had once held meetings.
On the podcast, she drew a straight line from the ads that chased her in 2016 to the money moving through the current election cycle against Democratic candidates. “That’s why you can’t count out all of the money that is being spent against our candidates to lie about them again,” she said.