The mainstream media for days has been claiming, “without evidence,”* that a clip of CNN’s Jim Acosta tangling with a 98-pound White House intern was somehow “doctored.” The clip was initially shared by InfoWars’ Paul Joseph Watson and then picked up by the White House. It showed a closeup of Acosta’s arm making contact with the intern’s.

If the idea was to discredit the White House’s condemnation of Acosta’s atrocious behavior at Trump’s press conference and its decision to yank his press pass, a “doctored tape” conspiracy theory would be a good way to do that.

As John Sexton Hot Air points out, the virtually indecipherable difference seen in a side by side comparison of the so-called “doctored” tape and the original video is likely “the result of frame rate adjustment that happens whenever a video is converted from one format to another.”

In other words, there’s no there there:

OK, I have been looking at this all morning – here's C-Span vs. the InfoWars clip from @PrisonPlanet that the White House tweeted. Any changes, if they did make them, would be incredibly minor – and possibly due to working across framerates and compressions pic.twitter.com/4FasYDZv4a — Luke Bailey (@imbadatlife) November 8, 2018

Can we put this MSM conspiracy theory to bed now?

Says Sexton:

On the intern question, yes he definitely did touch her with his left hand as he tried to hold onto the mic. I’m not suggesting it was a karate chop or an assault. It looks to me like he was trying to fend her off and got a little carried away trying to block her arm in the heat of an already heated moment.

My thoughts exactly. And anyone who accuses the White House of lying about Acosta putting his hands on her is blind or lying himself. He was being overly aggressive and obnoxious with the president and made physical contact with someone who was just trying to do her job. It wasn’t okay. Period.

Here’s another video of the altercation taken from another angle:

CNN's Jim Acosta claims that he did not touch the White House intern. Here's the clear video evidence showing that he did. pic.twitter.com/gXjfrEtWSv — Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) November 8, 2018

* See what I did there? The media’s favorite passive-aggressive dig at the president is to combine the term “without evidence” with every claim he makes in their headlines. They insist on taking everything the man says hyper-literally and then critically analyze every goofy, bombastic, hyperbolic, or sarcastic Trump utterance or tweet. And most of the time, it’s to push back against claims that they know are, in essence, correct.

I don’t remember any “without evidence” headlines in the media when Obama was pushing ObamaCare and telling the American people in speech after speech that they would be able to keep their doctors and health insurance, do you? Because millions of people lost their health insurance. Many of them while in mid-treatment for serious medical conditions.

Do you remember any “without evidence” headlines when the Obama administration called the 9/11/2012 Benghazi terror attack a demonstration over a YouTube video? Yeah, me neither.

In fact, I’m pretty sure Obama was allowed to lie his way through dozens of abominable scandals without any snarky “without evidence” headlines.