John Podesta says he’s now more careful with his words, two years after a viral conspiracy theory centered around him convinced a man to fire three shots in a Washington pizza restaurant in an effort to save children.
“Sometimes you feel compelled to do it anyway,” Podesta said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine of speaking out publicly. “And I don’t do it for fun. I do it when I think something’s serious enough that I need to say something. And now I’m just a little bit more guarded [about] it, and guarded about what appearances I accept.”
The conspiracy theory known as “Pizzagate” developed from emails that were stolen from Podesta’s personal account by Russian hackers and dumped online by WikiLeaks. Conspiracy theorists found “clues” in the emails, claiming Podesta was a pedophile and that he, Hillary Clinton, and the owner of D.C. pizzeria Comet Ping Pong ran a child sex-trafficking ring from the basement of the restaurant.
Podesta, Clinton’s former campaign chairman, considered suing the conspiracy theorists, such as InfoWars founder Alex Jones, but ultimately decided silence was the better route, he told Rolling Stone.
“If I really spent my life trying to figure out what those people were saying, it would drive me nuts,” he said. “The only rational reaction to that is to deal with it when there’s something serious and right in front of you, but for the most part to try to ignore it.”
He said he and his wife, Mary, still receive angry phone calls at home from trolls. His wife has taken a different approach from Podesta, choosing to have a conversation with them.
“When somebody actually engages them and says, ‘Why are you doing this?’ they fold pretty quickly. But she has more patience for that than I do,” he said.
