Rep. Anthony Weiner can't say for sure the crotch shot posted online was not of him - and then he brushed off reporters' questions with a stream of dirty jokes.
"I'm sorry I was a little stiff yesterday," the congressman said, apparently bemused by the horde of reporters pushing towards him.
"Maybe it will turn out that this is the point of al Qaeda's sword," he said. "The jokes kind of write themselves."
Weiner tried to clear the air after his testy initial response to questions about why a Blackberry photo of an underwear-clad crotch was posted to his Twitter feed on Friday.
But in a series of interviews and impromptu press conferences larded with double entendres, he only raised more questions and fueled the right-wing bloggers baying for his blood.
He flatly denied that he posted the Blackberry photo of an underwear-clad erection which appeared Friday in his Twitter stream addressed to a 21-year-old college student in Seattle.
But in a head-scratching explanation said he could not say for sure the photo was not of him.
"I can't say with certitude. My system was hacked. Pictures can be manipulated," he told MSNBC Wednesday.
"We don't know," he told the Daily News. "We've asked (a law) firm to look into whether some of my photos could have been taken, they could have been manipulated."
"You would know if this is your underpants," asked the stentorian Wolf Blitzer on CNN, in one of the most surreal TV moments of recent years.
Weiner ducked the question.
"I don't know what photographs are out there in the world of me," he said.
The New York congressman told the Daily News he hasn't asked the Capitol Police to investigate the hack but instead hired a private law firm, Baker & Hostetler, to look into it.
Weiner said he didn't want to "make a federal case" out of it or use national security resources to track down who hacked his Twitter.
"We're treating it as a prank, not treating it as a national security invasion or anything," he told the News.
"I'm not sure it rises - no pun intended - to that level," he told MSNBC, still joking even as the issue seemed to be snowballing rather than dissipating.
The photo was sent Friday over Twitter to Seattle student Gennette Cordova, a fan of the congressman who says she's never met him but once jokingly called him "my boyfriend."
The photo was quickly deleted, but not before right-wing bloggers republished it, suggesting it was proof Weiner - a longtime target for his combative liberalism - was cheating on his wife.
Weiner is married to Huma Abedin, the glamorous aide to Hillary Clinton who was considered the biggest catch in Washington when they married last summer.
Abedin has seen sexual innuendo and misdeeds take a heavy toll on the Clintons over the years.
On CNN, Weiner spoke eloquently about his wife, saying she is mystified by the storm of controversy.
"Hopefully, my marriage survives my first anniversary," he said ruefully.
Of the 198 people Weiner followed on the microblogging site, most are politicos or Twitter celebrities. But a handful are young women, which has fueled the rumors.
Several of those women contacted by the News said Weiner added them to his list after he put out a general call asking his fans who wanted him to follow them to type #WeinerYes.
"It's nothing sketchy or shady," said Victoria Pinter, who Twitters as kittenXpoker.
"He followed me because he was following everyone who did an @ reply with a certain hashtag," she said. "I just feel bad for Rep. Weiner and his wife."
One of the young women being whispered about is actually his sister in law, Weiner said.
Weiner said some people don't seem to understand the freewheeling ethos of Twitter, where "following" someone doesn't mean you know them or even agree with what they say.
"I don't think people should draw suppositions that I know any of these people," Weiner said.
He said he offered to follow any Twitter fans who asked, "and I just clicked and clicked and clicked kind of randomly. I try to look for New Yorkers, but it was fairly random," he said. "So that's where most of the citizens, the citizens that I follow, came from."
Weiner, who is a prolific and savvy user of social media, said he'd been targeted online before.
Hackers tried to get into his Facebook account a few weeks ago, and again Tuesday, he said.
"After I had changed my password, just yesterday I couldn't get in and it turned out that someone was trying to - maybe because of all of the attention - someone was trying to get into my account," Weiner said.
I am writing to express my EXTREME displeasure with this article. To list Twitter accounts and post full names is beyond reprehensible, not to mention incredibly irresponsible. I happen to know the woman whom you've mentioned in this article, and she has been bombarded constantly with this ever since. You should all be ashamed of yourselves. And you have the nerve to call yourselves journalists. You're nothing but tabloid trash.
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