Team Hillary Clinton allegedly tried to censor a video posted to social media by the Laugh Factory, the popular Hollywood-based comedy nightclub.
The short but very NSFW video embedded below, which the Clinton campaign allegedly tried to take down, contains snippets of five comedians mocking the 2016 Democrat presidential front-runner.
Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada claims that he received a call from a Clinton campaign operative pressuring/threatening him to pull the video, which is called “Hillary Clinton vs. the First Amendment,” and has received more than 300,000 hits on YouTube so far.
Masada added that the official for some reason also sought the personal contact information of each of the comedians in the video.
The Laugh Factory features A-list comedians as well as up and comers and considers itself a sanctuary for politically incorrect speech under the First Amendment.
Masada just received an award from the city of Los Angeles for charitable works and in the past was honored by the ACLU and the NAACP.
The supposed attempt at censorship was first reported on Wednesday by Judicial Watch, an organization which has previously claimed that ISIS operatives are active in northern Mexico in an attempt to penetrate the U.S. homeland.
“Masada told Judicial Watch that, as soon as the video got posted on the Laugh Factory website, he received a phone call from a ‘prominent’ person inside Clinton’s campaign. ‘He said the video was disgusting and asked who put me up to this,’ Masada said. The Clinton staffer, who Masada did not want to identify, also demanded to know the names and phone numbers of the comedians that appear in the video. Masada refused and hung up. He insists that the comedy stage is a sanctuary for freedom of speech no matter who is offended. ‘Just last night we had (Emmy-award winner) Dana Carvey doing Donald Trump and it was hilarious,’ Masada said.”
The Clinton campaign has issued no formal statement about this matter despite requests from various news outlets.
“For what it’s worth, the Clinton camp ?tells me? the call didn’t come from them. Judicial Watch tells me they stand by their story,” Slate writer Michelle Goldberg wrote , and who deemed the allegation bizarre, possibly a hoax/dirty trick, or the call to Jamie Masada might have been made by “a random, overzealous Hillarybot.”
The self-described apolitical Masada, who nonetheless blogsfrom time to time for the Huffington Post, conceded the call might have been a prank, however, and that Judicial Watch might have heard about the incident after some Laugh Factory employees spilled the beans to outsiders.
When @HillaryClinton visits @TheLaughFactory , don’t expect the 1st Amendment to stop https://t.co/W0xgesxiIr With @TiffanyHaddish + MORE!
— Laugh Factory (@TheLaughFactory) November 9, 2015
In story published yesterday, Reasoncolumnist Anthony L. Fisher explained that he spoke to the Laugh Factory owner directly and obtained some further detailsabout the disputed phone call over the Hillary Clinton comedy video.
“Masada told me the caller’s name was ‘John’ and that he didn’t remember the man’s last name or what his role in the campaign was, but that ‘John’ called the video ‘disgusting,’ asked ‘who put you up to this,’ and demanded that Masada remove it from YouTube. When asked how he could be sure this person was with the Clinton campaign, Masada said the man ‘sounded like a prominent person’ and had asked for the contact info of all the comedians in the video. Masada says he refused and told ‘John’ to ‘go f**k yourself,’ and hung up.”
The bottom line appears to be that the “jury” is still out on the Judicial Watch claim about whether there was an actual attempt by Team Clinton to remove the Hillary Clinton Laugh Factory video from the Internet, but apparently someone concluded it was no laughing matter.
[Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images]