You say that “people viewing the photo would have believed that they weren’t in the room”, which is not true; they merely might not have known that they were not in the room, which is completely different.
Do you realize we’re heading into “it depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is” territory? C’mon, you’re splitting that hair so thin that there’s barely anything there.
The bottom line is this: if you were to ask an average person, upon seeing the doctored photo, if Hillary Clinton was there, sitting next to whoever it was she was sitting next to, most people would say no — and that includes the readers of this paper. They would not say “Oh, that must have been Hillary’s spot, but she was taken out.”
The Wolf