Hillary Clinton has warned Kamala Harris of the risks of an unexpected and game-changing story in the final month before the presidential election—an event often dubbed an October Surprise.
Former Democratic presidential nominee Clinton, who narrowly lost to Donald Trump in 2016, predicted “efforts to distort and pervert Kamala Harris, who she is, what she stands for, what’s she’s done,” ahead of the November 5 vote.
Appearing on PBS News’ Firing Line on Friday, Clinton was asked “what is something that you can see happening in the near future that we should be taking more seriously?”
“I anticipate something will happen in October, as it always does,” Clinton told host Margaret Hoover, expressing worries about social media disinformation from Russia, Iran, China and at home, as well as her concerns about the digital news cycle.
“I anticipate there will be a full-court press in October. The digital airwaves will be filled.
“And why does that matter? Because the press, that is pro-Trump anyway, oftentimes stories are put on digitally that then are picked up by, let’s say it, Fox and others.
“Then those stories are stories, so the mainstream press reports on them, and so that story then takes on a life of its own.”
Both Clinton and Trump experienced an October Surprise during their 2016 campaigns.
The Washington Post published its “Access Hollywood tape” story on October 7, which documented Trump bragging in extremely lewd terms about groping women. Hours earlier, Wikileaks began releasing hacked emails from Clinton‘s campaign, which showed a debate question was leaked to her in advance and suggested she had a contradictory stance on trade deals promoted on the campaign trail.
“I mean, look the crazy story about me running a child trafficking operation out of a basement of a pizzeria,” she added, referring to bogus conspiracy theories that circulated about Clinton‘s campaign overseeing a child sex-trafficking operation beneath a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., where a man later opened fire while “self-investigating Pizza Gate.”
When audience members began laughing, Clinton urged them: “Don’t laugh—it was a huge story and it got one young man in North Carolina to get in his car with his assault rifle and drive up to liberate these non-existent children and shoot up a pizzeria in Washington, D.C.
“This is dangerous stuff. It starts online, often by the dark web, it migrates, it’s picked up by the pro-Trump media, it’s then reported on by everybody else.”
She added: “I don’t know what it’s [this year’s October surprise] going to be 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.”
Newsweek has contacted via email the Harris campaign for comment.
Last week, Clinton doubled down on calling Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables,” during her 2016 campaign comments about
Writing in the Washington Post, lamented that her choice of words had been “bad politics,” adding: “… if anything ‘deplorable’ is too kind a word for the hate and violent extremism we’ve seen from some Trump supporters.”
Hillary Clinton speaks during the Democratic National Convention, on August 19, in Chicago. Clinton has given Harris advice.
AP
