[Photo by BRANCO]
POLITICO: The woman who was sent a lewd photo from the Twitter account of Rep. Anthony Weiner says she doesn’t think the New York Democrat’s account was hacked, but that he may have been trying to send the photo to a porn star with a similar name. Gennette Cordova, a 21-year-old college student from Seattle, posed for a photo shoot with The New York Post on Thursday and shared her side of the story. “Her name is Ginger — it makes sense he might have mixed us up,” Cordova said, referring to Ginger Lee, a stripper and porn star who follows Weiner on Twitter. In March, Lee tweeted about wanting “sexual relations” with Weiner and, less than two weeks later, she wrote that she’d received a private direct message from the congressman. Weiner had also followed Lee on Twitter but said he stopped doing so when he found out who she was. Weiner said in an interview with CNN earlier this week that he thinks his note to Lee was a “fairly pro forma thing that goes out” to people who follow him on Twitter. MORE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: A sultry adult-film actress who got a private Twitter message from New York’s randy representative happily returned the favor — openly gushing over her “Mr. Sexy Congressman” in a slew of blog posts. “I want to have sexual relations with Anthony Weiner,” Ginger Lee wrote in a March 1 post. On March 13, after Weiner sent her a private message, Lee wrote: “you know it’s a good day when you wake up to a [direct message] from @RepWeiner.” MORE
SMOKING GUN: The prescient Twitter provocateur who, weeks ago, somehow divined that a lewd photo scandal was looming for Rep. Anthony Weiner claims he is fearful that his leading role in “Weinergate” will focus attention on a multitude of his own “major personal problems” that he is “afraid…will all come out,” The Smoking Gun has learned.As a result, “Dan Wolfe” has distanced himself from his online coterie of fellow conservatives, none of whom appear to know the true identity of Wolfe, who uses the Twitter handle “patriotusa76” and describes himself (assuming he is male) as a “Conservative Reagan Republican” opposed to “Obamacare, socialism, sharia.”
For months, Wolfe and several Twitter sidekicks have excoriated Weiner, 46, in the harshest terms. They have criticized his looks, claimed his marriage is a sham, and accused his wife of having ties to al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. On May 5, Wolfe floated a rumor that compromising photos of a “big time” congressman were in the hands of a “top 5 Right Wing blogger.” He tweeted, “@RepWeiner are you this Congressman?” He reprised this photo rumor in a May 11 tweet.
As the Weiner story began to spread over the weekend–and detractors started accusing him of somehow hacking Weiner’s accounts–Wolfe balked when Breitbart sought to arrange a conference call to discuss how to further exploit and advance “Weinergate.” In e-mails sent from his Yahoo account, Wolfe asked, “Why does he need to speak with me for this?” and “I’m just not sure why he needs to talk to me. Why is talking necessary?” MORE
RELATED: As the Anthony Weiner Twitter whodunit trundles on into almost a full week, it remains unclear where the now-infamous photo [pictured, right] came from. To help shed some light on this, I contacted Hany Farid, a renowned expert in forensic photographic image analysis. (Farid was consulted by the Associated Press in debunking the fake Bin Laden death photos, and has also teamed up with Microsoft to develop anti-child-pornography software.) Using compression data and metadata from millions of photos, Farid and his colleagues at Dartmouth have developed a database that matches photos to the 
digital cameras that took them. Anthony De Rosa of Reuters has already shown that the Weinergate photo’s metadata don’t match the metadata of another photo known to have come from the congressman’s Blackberry. I sent both photos to Farid, who analyzed them. Farid confirmed that the photo known to have come from Weiner’s camera was “inconsistent” with the controversial photo. In fact, Farid says, the photo appears not to have come from a Blackberry at all. But here’s the even stranger part: The controversial photo does not match any camera in Farid’s database, which consists of about 15,000 kinds of cameras, phones, and tablets. MORE