Denying he 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 several TV interviews 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 told MSNBC’s Luke Russert, “I didn’t send that picture out.”
In an interview later in the day on CNN, Weiner was asked the same question again. He said photos could be manipulated and that he had hired a private security company to look into the incident.
Weiner’s Twitter followers were exposed last Friday 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.
“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.”
Weiner said his cranky blow-up at reporters on Tuesday during a news conference was because he “was frustrated” at the repeated questions about his Twitter account and the photo.
Though visibly testy — and often combative — the congressman tried to squeeze in one lame joke during that news conference, bragging that he “passed [Tea Party favorite Rep.] Michele Bachmann today in the number of Twitter followers. I will give you that fact.”
Weiner, who follows lots of women on Twitter, said he generally follows women who send him messages to cheer him on — usually over one of his many appearances on TV to champion the left — and he then replies with an offer:
Weiner spent part of the day trying to clear his name by doing interviews with several news networks.
“When you’re named Weiner, it kind of goes with the territory,” he told CNN, adding that a hacker may have accessed his account just to make a joke off his name.
Weiner added, “Sometimes these things happen.”
During the CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer, Weiner was grilled by the veteran news anchor. At one point, Blitzer showed him a picture of the crotch shot several times when asking him about the incident.
“I appreciate you flashing that at me,” Weiner deadpanned.
Weiner refused to say whether he sent personal messages to Cordova. He also said no one else has access to his Twitter account password.
The tweet of the tasteless photo first was reported on Saturday by BigGovernment.com, a site run by conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart.
Weiner, 46, is married to Huma Abedin, an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“This was a goofy thing that happened,” said Weiner.
When Blitzer brought up Abedin and how she was coping with the Twitter controversy, Weiner joked that he hoped his marriage would survive to see its first anniversary in July.
The congressman over the weekend joked about the incident on Twitter, asking whether his kitchen blender would be next to “attack” him.
But during the MSNBC interview, Weiner took a more serious tone, saying the “story has gotten so out of control.”
The Brooklyn-Queens Democrat also said the issue was “not a national security matter.”
“I don’t want to make a federal case out of this,” he added.
At one point, Weiner even joked, saying, “I’m not really sure it rises — no pun intended — to that level.”
Weiner said he is not worried about losing his job.
“I was the victim of a prank,” he said. “That is the bottom line here.”
With AP