Former presidential candidate and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory at her book talk in D.C. on Monday night, calling it “a terrible example of what can be done by people who are malicious, unacquainted with the truth, and pursuing their own agendas.”

During a sold-out conversation with Politics and Prose co-owner Lissa Muscatine at the Warner Theatre, Muscatine revealed that Clinton had been in touch to issue her support throughout the ordeal and had even offered to speak up on behalf of Comet Ping Pong at the time. When Clinton was First Lady, Muscatine had been her speechwriter.

Clinton gave her perspective on how the publication of hacked emails from John Podesta, her campaign chair, on Wikileaks led to baseless accusations shortly before the 2016 election that the two of them were ringleaders of a child sex trafficking ring run out of the (nonexistent) basement of Comet Ping Pong, a popular restaurant and concert venue on Connecticut Ave. NW.

Dubbed “Pizzagate,” it led to harassment for Comet Ping Pong, its employees, and neighbors, like Politics and Prose. On December 4, an armed man named Edgar Maddison Welch drove from North Carolina because he “”read online that the Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves and that he wanted to see for himself if they were there … [He] stated he was armed to help rescue them,” he told police. Welch was sentenced to four years in prison in June.

Clinton places blame on Russia for hacking the emails. “You know, I hate the word hacked,” she said. “They were stolen by the Russians.” She said that she received information on October 7 from then-Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that they had “high confidence” Russians were behind “those thefts of email.”

Later that day, The Washington Post published the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is recording saying ““Grab them by the pussy.”

Clinton said at the book talk that “within one hour [of the Access Hollywood video release], such an amazing coincidence, Wikileaks dumped all of John Podesta’s personal emails … the psychology of it was brilliant.”

But she went on to say that the emails were “very anodyne, even boring … so they had to be weaponized, they had to have elements plucked out and perverted in a way that would be hard to imagine and then sent back out into the cyber, virtual world.” The conspiracy began on sites like on sites like Reddit, 4chan, and Twitter, and got picked up by far-right outlets including Alex Jones, who later apologized for his role in promoting it.

“John’s writing about pizza [in an email] and one of these really, I consider, evil people in the media world and in the online world, out of whole cloth make up this story that John Podesta and I are running a child trafficking ring in the basement of the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria.”

“By the way,” interjected Muscatine, “there is no basement.”

Clinton agreed and continued, “Now you would think people would be laughing like crazy, shaking their heads, but if you migrate that crazy story to Facebook posts, to news outlets, there are people who would believe that, including this very unfortunate young man in North Carolina who believed it.”

“It was meant to be believed to influence voting,” said Clinton. “Even I have to say I don’t believe it was meant to be believed to influence somebody to pick up an AR-15 and drive from North Carolina to Washington to liberate the imaginary children from the imaginary basement of the pizza parlor. But here came this young man, believing he was on a mission.”

“People could have gotten killed,” Clinton said. “He shot his automatic weapon off inside this pizza parlor. The street where Politics and Prose is was shut down. It was an active crime scene, because people who cared more about weaponizing information, making negative stories up, than the truth, than facts, than even public safety—and certainly any concern about children was nonexistent. They were determined to stimulate, to propagate the attitudes that would grab some people in some states, some Congressional districts, some towns and counties, so that they would be saying, ‘Well gosh, if Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman are doing something like that, they should go to jail. I can’t vote for that.’ That’s the worst example, but there are so many examples.”

Clinton said it was “one of the most serious challenges we face going forward in politics, not just at the presidential level but up and down, because if we don’t get a handle on information that is not just controversial, protected by the First Amendment but aimed at spreading lies to the extent that they can cause behavior like we saw in this terrible instance, it will not stop.”

Muscatine took the opportunity on stage with Clinton to publicly thank her for her support during the sustained harassment campaign, which included a phone call from Clinton while Connecticut Ave. NW was still an active crime scene. She added that Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, “bought a lot of pizzas and sent them to an after school literacy program in D.C., which was never publicized.”

The co-owner of Politics and Prose also noted that Vice President Mike Pence, who was living in Chevy Chase at the time, drove by the block in his motorcade as the trouble reached its zenith. “Did he once think about buying a slice of pizza?” asked Muscatine. “Of course not.”