6/1/11 1:58 PM EDT Updated: 6/1/11 2:19 PM EDT Rep. Anthony Weiner says he “can’t say with certitude” that the lewd photo of a man’s crotch sent using his Twitter account to one of his followers isn’t of him.
“I didn’t send that picture out,” Weiner said in an interview with NBC News.
“That’s not a picture of you?” reporter Luke Russert asked.
Weiner responded: “You know, I can’t say with certitude.”
The New York Democrat continued to claim that a hacker sent the photo to a 21-year-old college co-ed in Seattle.
“My system was hacked, pictures can be manipulated, dropped in and inserted,” he said. “One reason I asked a firm to look at what the heck happened here … is to see maybe something was manipulated, maybe something was dropped in.”
“We don’t know for sure what happened here,” Weiner added. “But let’s try to take a step back. This is a circumstance where someone committed a prank on the internet, spoofed me, made fun of me, whatever. We’re taking it seriously in as much we want to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Weiner hasn’t called for an official investigation by the FBI or Capitol Police, although he told Russert he has hired a private “securty firm” to find out what happened. Previously, Weiner had said he hired a lawyer to investigate.
“We don’t know exactly what happened here. It was a prank,” Weiner said.
But Weiner hasn’t sought a criminal probe because “it is not a national security thing — I’m not sure I want to put national federal resources into trying to figure out who posted a picture on Weiner’s website of whatever. I’m not really sure it rises, no pun intended, to that level.”
“And let me say one other thing,” he added. “I think it’s fair and reasonable to ask some of the questions. It was a prank, still, I think it’s fair to ask the question. I think we have to be careful not to take this out of context. this is not a national security matter. This is not an instance — we’re not making a federal case out of this and I don’t think anyone else should. But the things I do want to work on in Congress here are being interrupted by this, which I think is the intention of the person that did this to begin with.”
