President Donald Trump denied Friday that a video of CNN’s Jim Acosta shared by his press secretary Sarah Sanders was manipulated.
Many in the establishment media accused Sanders of sharing a “doctored” video of the incident that caused the White House to revoke Acosta’s press credentials this week.
Acosta refused to hand over a mic when a White House aide tried to grab it, as he attempted to argue with the president at a press conference Wednesday.(RELATED: White House Suspends Jim Acosta Access Over Intern Incident)
Sanders shared a video of the incident that zoomed in on the moment Acosta pushed the intern’s arm away from the mic he was holding.
BuzzFeed News found that the video had been reformatted and changed from high quality to a low-quality .gif, and then re-uploaded, which would explain why the video would look slightly different than the original.
Trump took questions outside the White House Friday before departing for Paris. A reporter asked if he thought Sanders doctored the video to intentionally mislead. Trump savaged the assertion, saying, “What are you talking about?” to the reporter.
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The president continued, “Nobody manipulated it. Give me a break. See, that’s just dishonest reporting. All that is is a close-up. That is just dishonest reporting. I watched that, I heard that last night. They made it close up. They showed it close up.”
Trump concluded, “And he was not nice to that young woman. … When you say doctored, you’re a dishonest guy because it wasn’t doctored. They gave a close-up view. That’s not doctoring.”
Earlier, Trump addressed the White House stripping Acosta’s credentials saying, “I think Jim Acosta’s a very unprofessional man. He does that with everybody. He gets paid to do that. Whether it was me or Ronald Reagan or anybody else, he would’ve done the same thing.”
Acosta denies that he acted inappropriately.
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