You can watch the video for yourself. If you do, I’m sure you’ll agree that if there was any contact, it was purely incidental and Acosta didn’t initiate it. You can accuse Acosta of grandstanding, but he didn’t come close to assaulting a young female intern.

But observable reality doesn’t seem to be causing any concern in the White House press shop. On Thursday, Sanders doubled down, tweeting out a new video, which appears to have been doctored, to try to prove that Acosta karate-chopped the young intern. Later still, she again tried to justify the administration’s decision: “The question is: Did the reporter make contact or not? The video is clear; he did. We stand by our statement.”

And now the same people who claimed I was lying about what happened to me in 2016 are standing behind these ludicrous White House accusations.