It was the shove heard ’round the world, as CNN’s (former) White House Correspondent began his usual schtick of trying to get President Donald Trump with a gotcha question, was told to sit down and resisted to the point of pushing a woman’s arm away to keep the microphone.

So sensational was the moment that it eclipsed the shooting in California where a dozen people died, but true to form, Acosta wanted the story to be about him and he got his wish.

While the event seemed to be cut and dried with plenty of video evidence to go with it, Acosta claimed that he never touched the woman who tried to take the microphone away from him. This prompted many to claim that the video of him touching the woman was doctored. In fact, many said that the video circulating from the White House was actually an InfoWars creation, specifically that of Paul Joseph Watson of Prison Planet.

The White House seemingly did use the video created by Watson.

This prompted Watson to respond in a video of his own, showing how the only thing he did was zoom the video in. He said he did not doctor it in any other way, and shows the editing process within the video to prove it. Watson further added that the reduction in quality of the video was due to video compression making it look “marginally different.”

Now a forensic expert has come forward, more or less confirming what Watson was saying in his YouTube video according to Motherboard with the exception of the video’s speed:

But Hany Farid, who studies digital forensics, human perception, and image analysis at the University of California, Berkeley, told Motherboard that he does not think the video was doctored. Though he agreed that the entire video was, of course, slowed down and zoomed in to focus on the moment of physical contact, he does not see any evidence to suggest that it was selectively edited to exaggerate Acosta’s motion. “From my review of the various videos of the press conference, I believe that the video tweeted by the Press Secretary is misleading but I don’t see unambiguous evidence that it has been doctored,” Farid told Motherboard via email. “A combination of a reduction in the quality of the video, a slowing-down of the video, and the particular vantage point of the CSPAN video gives the appearance that there was more contact between the reporter and the intern than there probably was. In particular, if you look at original, higher-quality videos from other vantage points you can more clearly see that while there was some contact between the reporter and intern, he did not strike her as his hand comes down.”

No matter how you slice it, Acosta did exactly what he was accused of. I, personally, watched the event live and saw the whole thing go down without any previous video interference. It would appear that the leftist press is attempting to tell us not to believe our own eyes, and using every excuse they can to make us disbelieve that it actually happened, including tying the video to InfoWars.

The leftist press is trying to defend Acosta, but they should be backing away from him as much as possible. If this was a right-wing journalist having done this to a staffer in a left-leaning White House, the media would be in an uproar and justifying stringing the guy who shoved her hand away to keep a microphone up from a tree.

If it’s bad when one person does it, it’s bad when another does it too. Acosta was wrong, and his punishment is fitting.

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