Noem, Johnson, and other Trumpites have been using “he lunged” as the reason for putting hands on him in the first place.
But as you note, any “lunging” happened AFTER they put hands on him. As far as I can tell from the video @Roderick_Femm posted in another thread (which I’ll paste here), hands were put on him in response to his speaking. They hear his voice, they grab him.
Obviously no reasonable person would consider that to be acceptable—therefore the lies about him “lunging” and “charging” BEFORE they grabbed him.
Incidentally, I can’t understand why no one is showing the following video. All the videos in all the stories about this incident, whether on TV or online, begin AFTER they’ve already grabbed Padilla. Why are all these “news” outlets covering up for the Republicans? Why are they helping them to lie about what happened?
The URL hidden there is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSkhaLhIvk