Weiner Hires Attorney

Hmmmm, this is interesting:

Just because a hacker broke into his Twitter account and sent a bawdy crotch photo to a co-ed is no reason to get the police involved, Rep. Anthony Weiner said yesterday.

Instead, "we have retained an attorney who is going to give us advice on this," the six-term Queens Democrat told The Post outside his Forest Hills home.

"[The incident] was a prank. It was intended to distract. I'm not going to let it do it."

Hacking and identity theft is a prank? Boy that Anthony Weiner sure has a good sense of humor.

And since when does the victim of a crime hire an attorney? The public provides attorneys for victims; they're called prosecutors. It is only the actual people perpetrating a crime who have to hire their own counsel.

Not to fear, though, Joe Cannon's on the case. He has deduced that the photo in question was a photoshop. And Weiner's hacking excuse?

Some of you may be wondering: If the image was Photoshopped, then why would Weiner say that his account was hacked? The answer is obvious: Because that was his honest presumption. It appears that someone really did try to fiddle with his Facebook account. The alternative possibility -- that there was no hacker, that the image on Breitbart's site was a concoction -- simply did not occur to him.

And amazingly enough, Weiner still hasn't stopped to check whether his presumption was true.

Pardon My Scha-Long

Roundup of Posts on Weinergate in the Blogosphere:

Mediaite gives the basic rundown of the story:

In what could develop into one of the most bizarre media stories in recent memory, Big Government is reporting that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) attempted to send a close-up photo — that’s extreme in more ways than one — to a user via Twitter. But the method by which this story evolved, late at night with no official comment and few leads, creates a web of questions through which the career of any participant could fall.

Here's the reported recipient of Weiner's Weiner:
Offhand, I can think of two reasons a man might send her some interesting photos of himself.

Weiner's claim is that his account was hacked:

The New York Democrat told POLITICO he thought it “obvious” that his account had been taken over, and he tweeted that his Facebook account had been hacked with the abbreviation “FB hacked.”

Which is an odd claim, since it was his twitter account that the photo in question was sent from. Then again, maybe he's just a computer NOOB and doesn't know the difference.

But one thing's for certain; the hacked claim certainly undercuts this Kossack defense:

Notice how the name RepWeiner is not only the brightest spot, but devoid of spatterings of color? That indicates that specific area -- the name -- has been saved more times than the rest of the image.

Here's a Weinergate timeline:

05/27/2011 16:00 @RepWeiner tweets that he is "Heading to 30 Rock to chat with Rachel at 9. #Thats545InSeattleIThink"
05/27/2011 19:30 @GennetteNicole re-tweets @RepWeiner's "30 Rock" message along with "#Thats545InSeattleIThink"

The significance of mentioning the Seattle time is that the recipient of the Weinergram lives in the Emerald City. Speaking of the girlfriend, her presence is quickly being erased from the Internet.

The coed’s name (one Gennette Cordova) was (obviously) easily accessible, thanks to the wonders of screenshots (such as the ones done by Doug Ross, via The Other McCain), so it was a fairly trivial exercise to do a search for her name, prior to May 2011. Turns out she’s a writer for her local college: examples here and here and here. Except that Cordova’s name is no longer on those articles: compare this to this, and this to this… and compare this to this, which has an extra layer of scrubbing going on. That last one is most interesting, because it’s the one that Lee Stranahan over at Patterico noted was an article apparently written by Cordova that talked about how sites like Twitter and Facebook would allow people opportunities to meet their ‘celebrities.’

Turns out Gennette was not the only to get a Direct Message from the Weiner:

Ginger Lee’s tweet said: You know it’s a good day when you wake up to a DM from @RepWeiner. (I’m a fangirl, y’all, he’s my trifecta of win.)

Here's a pic of Ginger:

If you Google her name and check the images, you won't find many that are safe for work. Ginger is a porn starlet.