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Hot dog, that wiener looks familiar!
Weasily New York Rep. Anthony Weiner exposed his kinky side yesterday — finally admitting the bulging crotch shot mysteriously sent from his Twitter account to a pretty young coed might actually be his own.
“You know, I can’t say with certitude,” he insisted when a skeptical-sounding MSNBC reporter asked, “That’s not a picture of you?”
“My system was hacked. Pictures can be manipulated, pictures can be dropped in and inserted,” Weiner said.
He later grudgingly admitted to The Post that snapshots of his nether regions could exist.
“There are photographs of me in the world, yes,” he said, when asked point-blank if he’d ever taken sexually charged snapshots.
The hot-headed Weiner spent yesterday desperately trying to shake off the scandal, which erupted over the Memorial Day weekend, by hitting seven cable news shows, where he gave defensive answers to reporters.
But the multinetwork tour turned into the biggest damage-control disaster since Charlie Sheen’s postmeltdown media blitz when the congressman relentlessly stuck to his script, acknowledging that the photo could be him but refusing to elaborate.
After giving his scripted answer on the photo to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last night, she asked if his talk-show tour did more harm than good.
“I’m not trying to be evasive, I just don’t know,” he claimed.
After days of ducking any questions about the controversy, the six-term married Queens-Brooklyn Democrat finally insisted he did not actually press the send button that launched the soft-core porn into cyberspace.
“I can definitively say that I did not send this,” he told Fox News Channel.
He said someone broke into his account and sent the eye- popping snapshot — showing an erect penis under snug gray boxer briefs — to 21-year-old Gennette Nicole Cordova, a junior-college student in Bellingham, Wash.
“When your name is Weiner, it goes with the territory,” he cracked in an interview with CNN.
Weiner turned prickly when The Post asked about his ever-changing descriptions of the incident — first calling it a hack, which is a federal crime, and then brushing it off as an innocent prank, not worthy of alerting authorities.
“Somehow, someone made use of my private account, so you can choose the term you like. I’ll leave it up to you. I know you don’t like big words,” he snarled as he bolted through the Capitol.
Asked earlier by MSNBC why he still hasn’t involved law enforcement, he said he didn’t want to use federal resources on the incident.
“I’m not sure I want to put national federal money to find out who posted a picture on Weiner’s Web site,” he said.
Unable to resist awkward double entendres, he said that the situation “didn’t rise” to a federal investigation and that maybe the alleged hacking was “the point of al Qaeda’s sword.”
Instead of informing law-enforcement authorities — especially the Capitol police, which investigates crimes against Congress members — Weiner hired a team of private investigators.
“We got a firm that is going to consult about which of the many authorities should be involved here,” Weiner told The Post, declining to identify the outfit.
“We’re not making a federal case over it. But we have retained a firm. We are going to be working with an Internet-security operation to find out, and will consult about what authorities, if any, should be brought in.”
Asked if he believes someone else had his password, he said it was possible.
“They’ll be looking into whether someone had my password,” he told CNN, referring to the investigative firm.
The embattled congressman also pledged to bone up on Internet-security procedures.
“We are taking it very seriously that it doesn’t happen again,” he added.
“Look, this is a prank. Someone sent a prank Twitter about my name. I’m kind of the victim of this,” he said.
Weiner was also grilled yesterday over the online company he keeps — specifically, a selective set of nubile young women he follows on Twitter.
A notorious ladies man prior to his 2010 marriage to Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, Weiner has 49,000 followers on Twitter but follows only 198 himself — including the bevy of beauties.
Pressed on how he picks the women he follows on Twitter, Weiner said, “It’s random. Yesterday, some guy complained he didn’t get followed and I added him.”
At one point in his lively online life, he was even messaging Tennessee porn star Ginger Lee on the social-networking site.
“I follow him on Twitter because I support him,” she said yesterday.
Weiner’s tone yesterday was gentler than a day earlier, when he lashed out at reporters during an impromptu press conference, calling a CNN journalist “a jackass” during the heated cross-fire.
Federal law-enforcement sources told The Post that sending a lewd picture to a recipient online is not a crime.
Adults can send each other nude, sexual or suggestive pictures of themselves as much as they want as long as it doesn’t rise to the level of harassment, sources said.
Democratic operatives were stunned by Weiner’s inept handling of the scandal.
Chris Lehane, a veteran Democratic strategist, said he was surprised Weiner had not been more forthcoming sooner.
“You aren’t going to get by on a story of this nature without giving a comprehensive explanation,” Lehane said. “The only way you can put out a fire that has been ignited with bad information is to douse it with good information.”
With additional reporting by Jeane MacIntosh, Josh Margolin, Bruce Golding and