WASHINGTON — BuzzFeed News has obtained parts of the video produced by Tea Party group FreedomWorks several years ago that features two female interns dressed up as a panda bear and Hillary Clinton, respectively, and appearing to pretend to engage in a sex act.
The video was produced by FreedomWorks before its "FreePAC" event in Dallas in July 2012, a conference attended by several leading conservative politicians as well as thousands of activists. Mother Jones reported the existence of the video in 2013. BuzzFeed News has obtained three sections of videos that were to be shown at FreePAC: In one, Adam Brandon, who is now the head of FreedomWorks after the departure of former president Matt Kibbe to run a pro-Rand Paul super PAC, is talking to the panda, which is holding an "Abolish the IRS" sign. "Oh, Panda, you really know how to warm my cold libertarian heart," Brandon says suggestively while grabbing the panda.
Another clip features Brandon talking to the panda. "How do you know so much about how freedom works?" he asks it. The panda removes its head to reveal a Hillary Clinton mask. It then removes the mask to reveal that it is Kibbe.
But the part of the video that caused the most internal consternation at the time was the scene featuring the intern dressed up as a panda appearing to be caught in the midst of giving oral sex to the intern dressed up as Hillary Clinton. Staff were against the video being shown at FreePAC, which had an audience composed mostly of older conservatives.
"It was a series of short videos with a common theme of a mystery panda," a former FreedomWorks employee told BuzzFeed News. The panda was a common meme deployed by FreedomWorks, being a play on words about Democrats "pandering." "When the staff watched the clips a couple of days before the event, most of them gave a big thumbs down. The scene with the underage interns alluding to oral sex was the thing that caused the staff to say this would be a bad idea at a FreedomWorks event."
"Adam Brandon was all for showing the video clips, and couldn't understand why others balked," the employee said. "He was very involved in the creation and direction of these video clips, and as you can see, participated in them as well."
The video ended up not being shown at the event.
"I don't have any thing to add since I last commented on this back in 2012," Brandon said when contacted by BuzzFeed News. Kibbe did not immediately return a request for comment.
Austin Petersen, who produced video content at FreedomWorks at the time, told BuzzFeed News he had written the videos and was disappointed when they weren't shown.
Asked why the videos didn't end up being shown publicly, Petersen said, "Obviously because I'm a young radical libertarian badass and most of FreedomWorks' audience is social conservative types."
"When I pitched it and wrote it, they were like 'Oh, yeah yeah yeah,' and then when we wrote and produced it they were like, 'Uh, no, this isn't going to go over too well with the social conservative crowd,' so they canned it," he said, referring to Brandon and "the rest of the decision-makers."
Asked why Brandon appeared in the video if he disapproved of its content, Petersen said that sometimes when shooting a video, "you don't always know what's going on with every shot all the time" and "just because he was there didn't mean he was always seeing everything." Petersen said he had "grabbed him and threw him in it."
Petersen said that the scene does not imply oral sex, but confirmed that it does directly reference a scene from "The Shining" in which Wendy looks down a hall in the hotel and sees someone in a bear costume appearing to engage in oral sex with a man. That particular clip is part of a longer video that includes other "The Shining" references (the Kibbe clip is supposed to reference "Scooby-Doo").
"It's not implied in any way shape or form that that's what's happening," Petersen said. "The only way you would think that's an implication of oral sex would be if you had seen the movie and then made a logical leap that that's what's going on."
"For comedic effect, it's recreating a scene that implied [oral sex] in the 1970s," he said.
Petersen confirmed that the panda and Clinton were played by interns, but said they had volunteered. He said he did not remember if they were female interns.
FreedomWorks, which played an influential role in the Tea Party's rise in 2009-2010, has struggled in recent years. Sources told BuzzFeed News the organization was in financial disarray in 2013, and the group made headlines when former House Majority Leader and FreedomWorks' former chairman Dick Armey staged an armed coup to wrest back control in the fall of 2012.
Politico reported on Thursday that Kibbe's departure this week was a result of his having been forced out by the board, which was reportedly concerned over the group's lag in fundraising.