The mystery surrounding an illicit photo on Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account deepened Wednesday after the New York Democrat admitted that he “can’t say with certitude” that the lewd picture was not of him. Weiner insisted, however, that he didn’t send the picture of a man’s crotch in gray underwear to a female college student in Seattle.
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Weiner repeated to MSNBC on Wednesday that his Twitter account was hacked over the weekend when the picture was sent.
“I was pranked, I was hacked, I was punked, whatever,” Weiner told NBC’s Luke Russert. “I’m an easy name to make fun of and I think that is what happened here. I didn’t send that picture out.”
In a series of television interviews, however, Weiner said he couldn’t be sure whether the picture was of his crotch or someone else’s.
“We’re doing everything we can to answer that question,” he said on CNN.
The seven-term congressman has for days been refusing to answer specific questions about the photo, saying he wouldn’t be distracted from important business even as reporters and photographers hounded his every move on Capitol Hill.
Weiner declined to ask Capitol Police to investigate, which has fueled speculation that it was he and not a hacker who sent the photo.
Weiner, 46, recently married Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“I hope my marriage survives its first anniversary,” he told CNN.
Weiner has a reputation as a brash lawmaker who loves to feed his Twitter account with witty musings and humorous but potent jabs at opponents. He tweeted on May 19 that a reporter is “doing a story on my tweets,” for the New York Times.
Weiner had 45,000 followers on Twitter before the news of the illicit photo broke. As of Wednesday, he had more than 52,000 people following him, but he has tweeted nothing about the underwear picture.
Weiner follows fewer than 200 people on Twitter and many of them are young women, a selection he describes as “random.”
One young woman he follows on Twitter posted on Wednesday, “You know, @RepWeiner is just one of 519 people who follow me. I’m not answering questions about any of them.”
Weiner said he has asked a “firm” with an “Internet security arm” to look into the matter and that he was eager to put it behind him.
“We could theoretically keep following these questions ad infinitum,” Weiner said on MSNBC. “At some point I think its fair of me to be able to say, ‘Enough, I’m done talking about this.’ ”
Russert pressed him on why he wouldn’t remember whether he had taken a photo of his groin area and Weiner suggested someone might have”manipulated” a photo in his Twitter account.
There was a touch of irony to the timing of Weiner’s Twitter scandal. While he ducked reporters most of the day and made himself scarce during floor votes, Weiner showed up in the well of the House midday to congratulate Rep. Kathy Hochul, a New York Democrat who was sworn in as a new member. Hochul replaces Rep. Christopher Lee, a Republican who resigned after he was caught sending a shirtless photo of himself over the Internet to a woman who was not his wife.
