In Tommy Christopher’s story about Betty and Veronica, the high school fans of Rep. Weiner, Christopher wrote that “Veronica” had told Betty about Mike Stack aka goatsred:

A high school friend of Betty’s, whom I will call Veronica (she’s a minor), was also contacted, via Twitter, by a member of the group, Mike Stack (@goatsred). For personal reasons I won’t go into, Veronica saw a means of getting attention, and agreed to follow @Goatsred so that they could speak privately. She told him that she and Betty had incriminating Direct Messages from Rep. Weiner, a claim she now admits was false, and which she made without Betty’s knowledge.

In fact, she was simultaneously telling Betty that @Goatsred had tried to induce her to lie about Rep. W[ei]ner, and to enlist Betty in the plot. Veronica now admits this was also false.

Yet Betty’s parents, in their statement (which sounds so much like a press release from Weiner’s crisis management team), claimed that Betty never knew Veronica was talking to Stack:

My husband and I have been made aware of an image that a popular blog is posting of one of my daughter’s classmates. This classmate specifically mentions my daughter by name and this classmate mentions that she can supply another twitter user (a grown man) with Direct Messages from my daughter’s twitter account that were between my daughter and Representative Weiner.

First, no one was ever authorized to speak for my daughter and my husband, myself or my daughter were NOT aware this classmate was interacting with this grown man and speaking for our daughter without her permission and without mine or my husband’s permission.

Like the other glaring contradictions in Christopher’s story, this contradiction has gone without notice until I said something about it. But with the allegations from Ginger Lee that Weiner induced her to lie and contact his PR people, the need to reinvestigate Christopher’s sloppy story is greater than ever. Don’t ask him to do it. He’s not going to.

Someone else will have to do it.

UPDATE: My statement about Christopher was a prediction, not a statement of fact. He has not explicitly declined to investigate. But he has strongly implied there is no need for one, saying the answers to all questions are already self-evident based on his reporting to date.

Now he’s trying to have it both ways, claiming it’s obvious there is no need for further investigation, but of course we should not assume from that position of his that he is not investigating further.

“It really sucks when one of your idols doesn’t live up to expectations.” — 16-year-old fan of Rep. Weiner, May 17.

Two weeks before the scandal broke.

And he mentions other women who might have compromising tweets.

I wonder if he was thinking of Veronica and Betty.

[Guest Post by Lee Stranahan]

There are four women it seems that Rep. Anthony Weiner sent sexual photos to…

1. Lisa in Nevada (admitted)
2. Meagan in Texas (admitted)
3. Ginger Lee, sex worker & lupus blogger (presumed – because why not?)
4. Gennete in Seattle (who was sent a photo, at least)

Different ages, races, looks – seemingly all very different women at first glance.

So, what’s Weiner’s ‘type’? The connection between all of them is that they are all people who admire Weiner’s politics. He doesn’t want anonymous sex thrills – he gets off on just the opposite. He likes it when they know exactly who he is and have seen him on TV> It’s all about Weiner.

Of course he doesn’t want to resign – it’s his pickup line.  Here’s an example…

From TmZ…

Weiss sought Weiner out, messaging him, "You are the coolest dem on the planet!"  She added, "Keep fighting for the sane people in this country!"

Weiner wrote back, "Thank you Lisa.  Glad you have my back.  You keeping an eye on the wackadoodle Angle for us."  Sharron Angle is a guns rights advocate who ran for Congress in Nevada.

Weiss tells us she’s a liberal democrat who believes in Weiner’s policies and spent a lot of time messaging him about his views.  She believes it’s unfair to target Weiner:  "Bill Clilnton was the best President we ever had and look what he did.  Kennedy banged everything in sight."

Let me remind you of what I said in my (prescient) article #Weinergate, Clinton & The Girl Under The Bus

There’s something about the musky combination of power, prestige and claims of doing good for all the people (but especially the poor and disenfranchised with voter registration cards) that is irresistible to certain women. It’s primal. And so they flock, and she’s thrilled to become a political insider by just allowing a politician to get inside her. But it’s a snare. As soon as the going gets tough and the spotlight becomes too hot, the woman usually learn they’ve been used like a tissue.

Modern history has taught that if you’ve going to fuck a powerful Democratic politician, keep some DNA as proof. A blue dress, a love child…something. Because he’s going to deny deny deny and make you out to be a crazed stalker, which you’ll have a tough time denying, really. Professional operatives will quietly regale reporters on background with stories of your wide eyed past and after all, you approached HIM. Benefit of the doubt will go to the man in the suit, especially when his slightly stiff (but brilliant!) wife stands by her candidate. But if you have some DNA that you’re willing to produce when it all gets too crazy, he’ll cop. He’ll have to. We’ve all seen too many episodes of CSI.

Okay, add to DNA – or pictures.

Weiner copped because HE HAD TO. It was Breitbart Photo Torture. No choice but the confess and then go Full Clinton. This was all predictable, which was how I predicted it.

Add this thought about Weiner’s types to Patterico’s recent checklist about the underage girls who were also big fans of Rep. Weiner. This story isn’t over.

– Lee Stranahan

Let me see if I have this straight:

• Underage girls claimed they had DMs from Weiner sent to a girl who asked him to prom.

• They also claimed they had non-innocuous DMs from Gennette Cordova.

• Then they take it back and claim they were lying.

• Contemporaneous statements contradict their new claim that they were lying.

• Their statement that they were lying sounds like it was written by a Weiner PR person.

• Another woman claims that Weiner offered her PR help after the scandal broke, and encouraged her to lie.

That about sum it up?

OK then.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Update: See the end of the post where I spare you the horror of the Weiner transcript.

As I wrote this I had the nagging feeling that I would have to eat my words:

But having slept on it, I am not sure how much it matters if [Gennette Cordova and Anthony Weiner] were sexting each other and I don’t plan to pursue that further.

And I didn’t plan to, but the hidden caveat was “unless somehow it became relevant to a larger issue.”  I mean my feeling was he admitted to sexting six women, some while he was married.  Even if that makes her number seven, what is it except just more?

But then dang it if Verum Serum didn’t find something that it add to the larger issue.  More on that in a minute.

First let’s back up.  Let’s be real, here.  I don’t have any firsthand knowledge, obviously.  I just see what you and I see and hear and I have my opinions about human nature.  But I think it strains credibility to say that they didn’t have an romantic  relationship of any kind.  I mean is it just a coincidence that she tweeted that Andrew Weiner was her boyfriend…

…and then about a month and a half later he sent that intimate photo?

Oh, and when announcing he was going to be on the Rachel Maddow show he mentioned the time in Seattle.  And she lives in Seattle.  And she retweeted that reference.

I mean which is more likely?  That Rep. Weiner was just sending out that picture to a woman he barely knew, hoping she wouldn’t turn and run to the nearest newspaper with it?

Or that they had developed an online rapport and that exchanging photos like that was just part of what they did?

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[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Update: This PJ Tattler headline says it all: Truthers and Birthers, meet the Weiners. Weiners being, of course, being the “Truthers” of the Weinergate scandal.

Yesterday I cited a parody of the conspiracy theories aired on sites like the Daily Kos, etc. that was actually written on Daily Kos.  And to their credit, it appears to still be there.  So yes, I will write something I never expected to write.  Go to Daily Kos and read it, it is a very good and funny piece.  Yes, at Daily Kos.  It feels as weird to write it as I am sure it is for you to read those words.

But just like when mocking the UN, it can be very, very hard to parody the conspiracy theorists, because generally parody involves comedic exaggeration and it’s kind of hard to out-exaggerate these people.

So thus we turn to Joseph Cannon.  He is apparently the proprietor of the website CannonFire, which is the originator of the yfrog exploit theory.  It sounded reasonable at the time, and there was an important feature to the theory: it was all repeatable (at least until yfrog allegedly fixed the exploit).  In that sense it was very similar to Charles Johnson’s Rathergate “experiment” where he simply took a copy of Microsoft Word, put it on its factory settings, typed out the document and produced a nearly exact replica of the supposed original memo written in 1973, in that you didn’t have to take Johnson’s word for it—you could do it yourself.  And several people I trusted including Lee said that they had replicated the yfrog exploit.  By all evidence the yfrog exploit was real, but ultimately a red herring.

So you would think that people like Joe Cannon would be eating some crow.  I said yesterday that it is wrong to judge people in 20/20 hindsight and I am sticking to that.  Still, yeah, in hindsight this guy is a heap of crazy:

Yes, it is proven that Anthony Weiner had highly sexualized internet relationships via email and chat with various women. Breitbart has strongly intimated that one of the photos in his possession is very, very explicit. It is fair to presume that this image involves an erection sans underwear.

Breitbart’s repeated references to that photo could be taken as a subtle threat to release it.

Okay, first, if you watched Hannity last night, Breitbart was making no bones about it.  He had the goods on this jackalope but he didn’t want to completely humiliate the man so he was holding off on releasing the worst picture until and unless Weiner made it worse by continuing to deny it.

So Weiner gets up there and confesses and all of us go, “okay, looks like it wasn’t a hack and he did everything he was accused of.”  But that wasn’t good enough for Joe Cannon, because he was still in love with his hacker theory:

A while back, in a comment, I said that I would not believe Anthony Weiner himself if he said that he tweeted that picture on the night of the 27th.

I also said that, were I him, I would make that very “confession.” Saying “I sent that picture on the 27th” would be the quickest way to get the whole sorry business into the rear view mirror.

You see, he thinks that Weiner was still framed, and thus he was blackmailed into confessing something he didn’t do.  And then it gets weird (which is why it is going below the fold), but funny, too:

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[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

The quote is from her blog, quoted here when I speculated on the relationship between Weiner and Ginger Lee, the adult entertainer.  Everyone of course suspects something is up when a congressman is communicating with such a woman, especially because later we saw strong evidence suggesting that Weiner was not sending pro-forma direct messages.  This was personalized, or so the evidence indicated.  But at the time the evidence was scant, and I try to be fair to people.  So I admitted that despite asserting her seriousness in loving the Weiner, we didn’t know that she would even do anything if she ever found herself alone with him.  On the other hand, knowing men as I do, I strongly suspected that he was at least interested in some kind of relationship with her.

And for informational purposes (and not at all for Rule 5 reasons), let’s have the pretty pic of her again:

Well, we don’t need to speculate any more.  TMZ has spilled the whole thing:

Weiner and former porn star Ginger Lee exchanged scores of sexual emails over a long period of time.  When the underwear scandal broke on May 28, Lee began receiving calls from the media, and Weiner was more than happy to help her control the situation … by lying.

A politician is telling people to lie?  Say it ain’t so, Joe!

Still some of the inside baseball is interesting.

On June 2, Weiner emailed Lee, “Do you need to talk to a professional PR type person to give u advice?  I can have someone on my team call. [Yeah, my team is doing great. Ugh].”

Yes, the giant Weiner was suggesting that his problem was lousy PR people—you know, as opposed Weiner himself calling a reporter a jackass.

Weiner put on a full court press, urging Lee to lie about their relationship.  On June 1, he emailed her:  “The key is to have a short, thought out statement that tackles the top line questions and then refer people back to it.  Have a couple of iterations of: ‘This is silly.  Like so many others, I follow Rep. Weiner on Twitter.  I don’t know him and have never met him. He briefly followed me and sent me a dm saying thank you for the follow.  That’s it.'”

Weiner suggested a nice touch — some good ol’ Southern charm: “And then maybe insert some y’alls in there.”

Hmm, who was it that wrote “[w]hat a cute accent”…?  By the way, for the record, not all Southerners say y’all.  My impression is it’s more of a Texas thing although surely it doesn’t stop at that state’s border.  Like no one said y’all when I lived in North Carolina, but obviously they did in Texas.

And for that matter, y’all isn’t limited to the South either.  I feel a musical interlude coming on…

Still you should read the whole piece by TMZ.  They point out that there is potential ethics trouble, here, too, because that PR staff might have been part of his office staff.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]