The Other McCain

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The Curious Case of the Weiner-Following (And Weiner-Followed) Teenage Girl

Posted on | May 30, 2011 | 73 Comments

One of the aspects of #WeinerGate that cropped up early was that a teenage girl was among the 90-odd people that Rep. Anthony Weiner was following on Twitter.

Several people have mentioned this to me, sending me e-mails with screen-caps of a Tweet (from April 13) in which the girl said she was “talking to Rep Weiner from New York right now! is my life real?”

When the #WeinerGate scandal went public, the girl blocked her Twitter account and changed her screen-name — thus preventing anyone (except people with whom she was mutual followers) from looking at her feed. Sunday, however, she sent this message:

Unblocking my tweets and changing my name back. I didn’t do sh*t and I’m in no way involved in your political bullsh*t.

OK, fine, Little Miss Potty-Mouth. Nobody is accusing you of wrongdoing. But your contact with Rep. Weiner goes toward establishing a pattern, a modus operandi, in Rep. Weiner’s behavior.

And as for your being uninvolved in “political bullsh*t,” I’m looking at who you’re following on Twitter — as of this hour, 114 people — and I see: Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Sen. Tom Udall, Sen. Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Rachel Maddow, Michael Moore, Bill Maher, Barack Obama and just about every Democrat politician in Delaware. (Yes, Little Miss Potty-Mouth  is evidently from Delaware.) That’s a partial list.

If approximately 1/5th of the people you’re following are either Democratic politicians or liberal media figures, and in April you were telling people you were talking to Rep. Weiner, how are you “in no way involved” in politics?

Some very clever people are researching this, and can find no indication that the teenage girl’s family is so politically connected — e.g., major Democratic donors or operatives — as to explain why Rep. Weiner would have contacted her, as a courtesy to the child of a patron or something like that.

Her claim to have been “talking to” Weiner in April therefore remains mysterious. She’s apparently a minor, so I’m not going to name her, although other bloggers have. But I felt it necessary to point out the existence of this mystery, just to show that the case of Gennette Cordova is not an isolated incident.

There appears to be some kind of pattern here, although what that pattern means is impossible to say, because Rep. Weiner has not explained it.

UPDATE: S.A. Miller was a reporter at The Washington Times when I was an editor there, so I was shocked to see that he misread Gennette Cordova’s statement, as evidenced in his New York Post story today:

The woman on the receiving end of the tawdry tweet — 21-year-old Gennette Nicole Cordova — said in a statement . . . that she was sure the questionable photo came from a person who had harassed her many times “after the congressman followed me on Twitter a month or so ago.”

No, Steve, that’s not what she said. And, as noted previously, Ms. Cordova is stunned that so many reporters read it that way.

As she has since clarified on Twitter, Ms. Cordova initially thought the photo was a fake sent by the “harasser” (@PatriotUSA76 a/k/a Dan Wolfe). However:

@GenetteC — Can I just clarify that, although @patriotusa76 has been a nuisance, I never said or implied that he was behind the tweet.

@GenetteC — Moreover, I never once speculated about the alleged hacking.

So this pet idea of some reporters — that Ms. Cordova’s statement solves the #WeinerGate mystery — is not justified by fact. Ms. Cordova also Tweeted that she had expressed her “dissatisfaction to NYDN over their implication that I backed the hacking theory.” (Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)

As for Weiner spokesman Dave Arnold’s assertion that the congressman’s Twitter and YFrog accounts were “obviously hacked,” Jammie Wearing Fool replies: “If it’s so obvious, why doesn’t he contact the police? This happened three days ago, so what is he waiting for?”

This is the big question: If Weiner was “hacked,” that’s a crime, an illegal breach with possible national security implications, which would seem to demand investigation and prosecution.

All this idiotic “Blame Breitbart” noise might fool some people, but I wasn’t born yesterday.

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Category: Anthony Weiner, Congress, New York, Scandal

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