They were monitoring the Democratic member’s twitter habits for months.
Three months before Representative Anthony D. Weiner sent a photo from his Twitter account to a 21-year-old Washington State college student named Gennette Cordova, a small group of determined, self-described conservatives were warning young women on Twitter, including Ms. Cordova, to be wary of him.
Calling themselves the #bornfreecrew on Twitter, members of the group closely monitored those whom Mr. Weiner was following, taking it upon themselves to contact young women they believed to be “schoolgirls,” and urging them publicly to stay away from him, according to an analysis of posts on Twitter’s public stream.
By early May, members of the group were also speculating that Mr. Weiner would be caught in a sex scandal. The leader, a man who identified himself on Twitter as Dan Wolfe and used the handle @PatriotUSA76, is the same Twitter user who discovered the photograph that Mr. Weiner took of himself and sent to Ms. Cordova. He shared it with his followers and the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who made it public the next day.
Weiner’s twitter following habits were the “tell,” the same “tell” that made his “#hacked” defense implausible from the get-go, to anyone who was pursuing the facts.
Weiner’s stupidity in all this is almost gravity defying. He was evidently aware that these conservative tweeps were out there watching him, yet he persisted in his cyber harem. I still think Roger may be onto something in speculating that maybe somewhere deep down, Weiner wanted to get caught — or at least see how close to the line he could get without getting caught. He may also have figured that if he got caught, no one in the media would believe his critics. Given how the story played out, the media almost proved him right.
By the way, before liberals resume resorting to the “honey trap” defense to absolve Weiner and cast blame on the tweeps who watched him:
Michael Madden, 52, a retired Philadelphia firefighter and member of the group, said he had joined Mr. Wolfe in warning young women about Mr. Weiner.
“It seems now that Dan may have had an agenda all along,” he said. “We don’t know yet what it is. But he never said to me, ‘I’m going to get this guy.’ What he said is that it was not right.”
If anyone was setting a trap, it was the powerful Weiner from New York.
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