The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Oh, My: In NBC Interview, Weiner Won’t Deny Authenticity of Lewd Photo UPDATE: Interview Video Added

Posted on | June 1, 2011 | 44 Comments

UPDATE 3:50 p.m. ET: Here is a video clip from the interview with NBC’s Luke Russert in which Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) refused to say “with certitude” that the photo of a man’s bulging underwear sent from his Twitter account was not actually his own crotch:

Hat-tip to Ace of Spades who asks:

What? Andrew Breitbart had a picture of his junk? How did Andrew Breitbart get that? What other people does Andrew Breitbart have junk-pictures of?

The sarcasm is kind of thick there.

UPDATE 4:27 p.m. ET: The New York Post:

Denying he ever sent a bawdy crotch photo of himself to a co-ed via his Twitter account, embattled Rep. Anthony Weiner said today he “can’t say with certitude” whether or not he is the person in the picture.
Asked in an interview with MSNBC that aired this afternoon whether he could confirm or deny if the crotch shot was his, Weiner said, “I can’t say with certitude.”
Despite the bizarre claim, Weiner added, “I didn’t send that picture out.” . . .
“We don’t know exactly what happened here,” he said in the interview, repeating what he has said over the past four days. “It was a prank.”

With this admission — and if he’s not denying it, isn’t that the same as admitting it? — Weiner has deepened the mystery, and thereby given new life to the story. Reporters can’t just leave this hanging there, unexplained.

Donald Douglas at American Power calls attention to this ABC News video. Notice how George Stephanopoulos (scarcely a right-winger) featured the WeinerGate story today on Good Morning America:

You see that, as Stephanopoulos says, Weiner is a “high-profile Democrat” whose avowed ambition is to become mayor of New York City — America’s most lucrative media market.

The supply-and-demand incentives for coverage of this story are therefore so strong that, liberal bias or not, the major news networks can’t simply ignore it. In fact, I had the TV in my office tuned to MSNBC for a couple hours today, then turned over to Fox News, and MSNBC actually had more coverage of the story than Fox!

You might say that Weiner is too big for his own good.

UPDATE 7:50 p.m. ET: Now a Memeorandum thread, and thanks to Left Coast Rebel who found a better quality video of the Russert/Weiner interview.

PREVIOUSLY (2:10 p.m. ET): The things you learn watching MSNBC. Just saw clips of Anthony Weiner’s interview with Luke Russert of NBC News, and here is a brief item from Huffington Post:

A day after telling reporters that he’s “not going to talk about this anymore,” Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) broke his silence Wednesday about the controversy surrounding a lewd photo sent from his Twitter account.
“This was a circumstance where someone committed a prank on the internet,” he told MSNBC’s Luke Russert. “I didn’t send [that] picture out” the congressman said, though he does not know who did. Is the photo of him? “I can’t say with certitude” he told Russert.

Weiner told Russert that the pattern of who he follows — a pattern that the New York Post noted today — is “completely random.”

Yeah. Right.

UPDATE: First things first: Let’s just state the obvious, OK? If Weiner will not deny “with certitude” that the now-infamous photo is of his own package, we can safely conclude that it is his package.

But watching the whole interview — and we’ll have the video soon enough — I think I’ve finally developed a theory of the case. If my theory is correct, then there is an obvious reason why Weiner would not want law enforcement agencies to investigate this incident.

Ask yourself this: If that was a photo of Weiner’s package, and yet he was not the one responsible for that Tweet to Gennette Cordova, how did someone else get that photo of Weiner’s package?

Time for members of Congress to demand that law-enforcement agencies investigate this incident.

UPDATE I: You will see that, in the comments below, “Charles Johnson” (who may or may not actually be the Charles Johnson) explains a theory of how Weiner’s YFrog account could have been used by someone else to send that photo.

That theory was first related to me via an e-mail tip over the weekend. I didn’t report it previously, because it wasn’t necessarily relevant. Now that Weiner has point-blank refused to deny the authenticity of the photo, however, it becomes quite relevant.

Also now arguably quite relevant? The fact that Anthony Weiner was exchanging private Twitter direct messages (DMs) with porn star Ginger Lee. I’m not prepared quite yet to explain my whole theory of this scandal — still want to aggregate more news here — but if Weiner was in private communications with women such as Ms. Lee, we might fairly suppose that he also communicated in similar manner with other women.

And here’s the key: What if some of Weiner’s lovely female Twitter “fans” were not actually fans? What if, in fact, they were quite the opposite? Could this explain how a photo of Weiner’s package ended up in the hands of the congressman’s enemies?

It’s a “honey trap,” in other words. Permit me to suggest that there must be at least one more shoe to drop — someone must have a cache of DMs or e-mails in which Weiner communicated privately with a female he presumed to be a fan. The exposure of Weiner may, therefore, only be beginning.

As Ed Driscoll says, “Plenty of Room Left on Fredo’s Boat.”

UPDATE III: Politico and CBS News are now both reporting Weiner’s “can’t say with certitude” interview (hat-tip: Donald Douglas at American Power). There is a crappy video version of the Russert interview at Real Clear Politics, but not yet an embeddable version.

Linked by Nice Deb — thanks!

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Anthony Weiner, Congress, MSNBC, New York, Scandal

Comments

Comments are closed.