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Just because a hacker broke into his Twitter account and sent a bawdy crotch photo to a co-ed is no reason to get the police involved, Rep. Anthony Weiner said yesterday.
Instead, “we have retained an attorney who is going to give us advice on this,” the six-term Queens Democrat told The Post outside his Forest Hills home.
“[The incident] was a prank. It was intended to distract. I’m not going to let it do it.”
Capitol police told The Post that neither Weiner nor his staff has filed reports regarding the apparent breach of Internet security that set the blogosphere rumor mill afire about the liberal Beltway star over the weekend.
On Friday, Weiner’s 40,000 Twitter followers were exposed to a below-the-waist image of an aroused man’s boxer-briefs in what appeared to be a private missive posted publicly by mistake. It had been sent to 21-year-old Gennette Nicole Cordova of Seattle, whom he follows on Twitter.
Political opponents seized on the incident and compared Weiner to married former upstate GOP Rep. Chris Lee, who quit last year after being caught trolling for dates on Craigslist.
Then, Weiner’s backers questioned why conservative blogger Dan Wolfe, who had been hinting about a Weiner scandal for weeks, appeared to be the only person to have noticed the dirty image and retweeted it. Wolfe yesterday told The Post he simply retweeted it from the original posting.
Cordova yesterday returned to Twitter with renewed force — and oddly refused to take a stand.
“I do not back, nor do I doubt, any hacking theory,” she tweeted.
But she also wrote, “Even more ridiculous than the idea that I was having an affair [with] AW is the theory that I help set him up. Who comes up with this?”
Weiner said yesterday, “Look, you’ve got the Republicans . . . playing games with the debt limit. You’ve got a Supreme Court justice who is refusing to recuse himself despite conflicts of interest. We have a health-care act that is under siege. This is a distraction, I get it. I was hacked. It happens to people. You move on.”
Additional reporting by Chuck Bennett and Jeremy Olshan