Another Victory for Big Money

[SoDesuKa]

I haven't heard this discussed, but it seems obvious that the same kind of big money that went after Eliot Spitzer went after Anthony Weiner. In Spitzer's case it involved paying a team of gumshoes to follow him around and also buy access to his financial records. Then they had to cover their tracks, which involved even more money.

It seems very likely that there was some kind of bounty on Weiner especially after a few high-profiile positions he took in Congress. Somebody got access to his Twitter records, not exactly by accident but it was probably jiggered around to look like one.

Money opens doors. People are venal, especially when there's a prospect of receiving laundered cash. I'm not close enough to Weiner's career to speculate on who badly wanted him out of the way. It could simply be they wanted to stop him from running for Mayor to block him from enforcing laws that have gone dormant under Bloomberg.

Weiner will recover just like Spitzer has recovered, after a fashion. There's talk of appointing Spitzer as some kind of Special Prosecutor after his days as a talk show host draw to a close. Spitzer may know who had it in for him and Weiner may have a good idea as well.

One possibility is the Homeland Security industry, which may want to curry favor with Weiner nemesis Peter King, now the Chair of the Homeland Security Committee. Weiner and King went at it bitterly a few months back when Republicans forced King to vote against a first-responders' relief bill that King had introduced.

The old way of doing things was to push somebody out the window and say he jumped. Now they dig, dig, dig until they find something embarrassing and act like it was the Decline of Western Civilization.



You mean the microphone was on
. . . . the whole time?

[Dreamer Tatum]

1. You mean he took money to spread cock pictures around the web?

WOW! What a revelation!

[Angry Dragon]

2. +1000

[SoDesuKa]

3. Black Market in Information

I wouldn't be surprised if there are people within Twitter that know the black market value of the information in their records. This stuff normally can't be gotten even with a subpoena.

Twitter employees are just ordinary folks with ordinary venality. If Weiner thought he'd covered his tracks because Twitter routinely deletes tweets after only a day or so, he hadn't factored in the money that was out there chasing his secrets. There's nothing far-fetched about this.

Eliot Spitzer, a former prosecutor, was more diligent than most in avoiding a trail. Even though the agency that nailed him claims they were just following legitimate leads, I'll bet Spitzer knows he was set up and he may even know who did it.

[msongs]

4. exactly how much money did weiner take to spread his own pics around the net? nt

[JDPriestly]

5. Excellent post.

There is a pattern as to who gets "outed" and who does not.

I fell for it at first, but the outings seem to have a trend.

Sex is a trap for every human animal because we forget that, deep down, we are just as much animals as the squirrels that chase each other around the trees.

Sex is an instinct, and those of us who are lucky are in control of our instincts. Others are not so lucky.

[SoDesuKa]

6. Sequence of Events

I don't know how Weiner's political enemies became aware of his Twitter habits. My hunch is that there's a web of dirt-seekers who know there's money available to them if they dig something up. There's nothing far-fetched about this speculation; it's how the paparazzi operate. A nasty pic is worth money, and the nastier the pic the more it commands.

Somebody in this paparazzi-like operation may have heard a rumor from a friend of a friend of one of Weiner's Twitter contacts. This would have set their acquisitiveness twitching, and they scouted around for funding. We'd have to know more about Weiner to speculate who was the paymaster for this operation.

The Whitewater investigation was a cover story to find out who Clinton was currently pursuing. He'd been notorious as governor and it was quite possible, they reasoned, that he was still a skirt chaser. Monica Lewinsky may not have been a plant, but aspects of the story suggest there were people behind the scenes who were more than routinely opportunistic. Linda Tripp advised Lewinsky not to have the dress dry-cleaned "for your own protection," they told her.

Eliot Spitzer was almost certainly set up. Detectives followed him to Washington where he checked into a hotel but didn't attend any functions. That must have sent up a flare to people who simultaneously noticed that the Governor's travel logs didn't note any business in Washington. At that point it was a matter of crossing the gypsies' palms with silver. The real art with these set-ups is creating believable cover stories. The "official" story about Spitzer was pretty clever - I remember laughing at it.



Tell Momma. Tell Momma ALL.