Sunday evening, the New York Daily News took
the unusual step of publishing a statement in which a 21-year-old
college student from Seattle denied being the mistress of Rep.
Anthony Weiner (D-NY). Gennette Cordova said she had never even met
the congressman, explaining that an April message on her Twitter
account describing Weiner as her “boyfriend” was intended as a
joke. Yet it was not what Cordova said on Twitter that made her
statement so newsworthy. Rather, it was what was sent to her late
Friday night from the congressman’s Twitter account: a link to a
photo showing the crotch of a man clad in gray underwear, quite
visibly in a state of concupiscent arousal.
That Tweet (as Twitter messages are called) was
potentially visible to the more than 40,000 people who follow
Weiner’s Twitter feed, including his political enemies, who
immediately interpreted this shocking message as evidence that the
liberal Democrat was up to online hanky-panky. Employing the
unfortunate double entendre to which the congressman’s
name lends itself, the evident scandal was quickly classified by
its own Twitter “hashtag” label: #WeinerGate.
Within hours, the story was
reported by a pseudonymous writer on BigGovernment.com, a
conservative website whose publisher Andrew Breitbart has become a
bête noire of the American Left, and by Saturday afternoon
that story had become the hottest meme
on the blogosphere. By then, however, Weiner had sent several
Twitter messages claiming that he was the victim of an Internet
hacker, a claim elaborated Sunday in a statement from the
congressman’s spokesman: “Anthony’s accounts were
obviously hacked. He doesn’t know the person named by the hacker,
and we will be consulting on what steps to take
next.”
Can you guess what steps those would be? By Monday
evening, Weiner had
lawyered up, retaining an attorney to advise him on
“what civil or criminal actions should be taken,” the
congressman’s spokesman told Politico.
Exactly why Weiner would need an attorney’s advice in this
case is unclear. As one blogger who has followed the scandal
observed, it should be an easy fee for any competent lawyer:
“Call the police. That will be $1,000.”
Indeed, Weiner’s claim that he was targeted by a hacker
amounts to a criminal accusation. If he is telling the truth, a
federal crime has been committed, one which might have national
security implications. If the online accounts of members Congress
are vulnerable to hijacking, who is safe? Could the hackers who
(allegedly) penetrated Weiner’s account also hack into the e-mails
of members of congressional intelligence and defense committees?
Yet the congressman’s office has said nothing about reporting this
hacking to the FBI or other law enforcement agencies. According to
CNN, neither the FBI nor Capitol Police are
investigating.
Weiner, who is not camera-shy, waited until Monday to give
his
first TV interview about the incident, and seemed strangely
dismissive. “I was hacked. It happens to people, and you move on,”
the 46-year-old Democrat told CNN’s Dana Bash. “This is a prank —
not a terribly creative one — and it’s a distraction.” If Weiner
was the victim of malicious identity theft, why would he be so
eager to “move on” from this “distraction”? That’s just one of many
obvious questions provoked by WeinerGate, which is a scandal that
will no doubt be confusing to many people not familiar with
Twitter, the popular social networking site that permits people to
send out short messages limited to 140 characters. Indeed, the
scandal was confusing to Cordova, the Twitter user to whom the
Tweet with the lurid link was sent from Weiner’s
account.
In her
600-word statement to the Daily News, Cordova said she
logged into her Twitter account Friday and was surprised to find an
unusually large number of “mentions.” (A “mention” is when someone
posts a message that includes your Twitter name. The congressman is
@RepWeiner, while Cordova’s account — which has since been deleted
— was @GennetteNicole.) Cordova said she recognized some of these
mentions as coming from the account of someone who had “harassed”
her after she first followed Weiner’s Twitter feed.
“Since I had dealt with this person and his cohorts
before I assumed that the tweet and the picture were their latest
attempts at defaming the Congressman and harassing his supporters,”
she said in her statement.
That statement was interpreted by several reporters
(including
media critic Howard Kurtz) as tantamount to proof that the
whole story was “fake,” and that Weiner’s enemies had indeed hacked
his account or somehow fabricated the offensive Tweet directed at
Cordova. When she subsequently re-emerged with a new account
on Twitter, however, Cordova said she had been misunderstood:
While she had initially believed this was a phony smear created by
the congressman’s enemies, she later “realized it was real” — the
message had indeed come from Weiner’s account — although she
“never once speculated about the alleged hacking.” Cordova is a
student journalist who writes for the campus newspaper at her
community college in Bellingham, Wash., but the media flubs
prompted her to remark:
“A lot of these journalists are incompetent hacks… maybe I should
reconsider my professional aspirations.”
Reporters trying to cover WeinerGate kept flubbing basic
facts of the story, some reporting that the Tweet that started the
scandal was sent on Thursday, others saying it was sent Saturday.
Part of the problem was that the facts were strewn across the
Internet, scattered among several different blogs, often mixed in
with speculation and sarcastic commentary, so that locating the
facts and synthesizing them into a coherent narrative was
inevitably difficult. (Bryan
Preston of Pajamas Media compiled a summary Monday evening.)
Another part of the problem was that the blogs providing best
coverage of the story — including the award-winning Ace of Spades HQ — are conservative, while
most journalists are liberal and therefore unwilling to credit the
suspicions these hostile bloggers voiced against a Democratic
congressman who claimed to be the victim of Internet mischief. Joan
Walsh of Salon went so far as to claim that the whole
thing was ginned up by Andrew Breitbart, an accusation he angrily
rejected Monday evening: “We
are simply reporting the facts.”
Others have gone farther than Breitbart’s writers, seeing
Friday’s “Twitter incident” (as Politico
called
it in their headline) as part of a pattern of Weiner’s
online behavior. The congressman, who last summer
married a longtime aide Hillary Clinton, appears to have
exchanged private direct messages (DMs) on Twitter with more than
one attractive woman, including
porn performer Ginger Lee. While Weiner is followed by tens of
thousands of Twitter users, he follows fewer than 200 accounts
himself, among which conservative blogger
Jim Hoft noted a number of young women of no particular
political interest. Which may be significant,
considering that Twitter DMs can only be sent between users who are
mutually following each other’s feeds.
Of course, this pattern that aroused conservative
suspicions may not signify any inappropriate intent on the
congressman’s part, and there may yet be an innocent explanation
for how his Twitter account was used to send that bulging underwear
photo to a college student. But if Weiner was the victim of
hackers, as he says, the sooner those culprits are brought to
justice, the safer the Internet — and the congressman’s career —
will be.
