White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stood by her tweet of an apparently doctored video of CNN’s Jim Acosta, manipulated to make it appear that he got physical with a White House press intern.
“The question is: did the reporter make contact or not?,” Sanders said in a statement Thursday. “The video is clear, he did. We stand by our statement.”
The video appears to be taken from fringe far-right website InfoWars to make it look like Acosta chopped down on the intern’s arm. In reality, she reached into his personal space repeatedly to grab his microphone, which he held onto as he tried to get President Donald Trump to answer his question.
The White House has used the fabricated physical altercation as grounds to revoke Acosta’s press pass, a move that reporters of all stripes and ideologies have condemned.