It’s official.  Former Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY), who resigned in disgrace over a bizarre sexting scandal this past June, was NOT hacked.

Today, eight months after the congressman first claimed he was the victim of a hacking or a prank, the NY Daily News has broken the story that Anthony Weiner spent more than $13,000 in campaign funds to hire private investigators to track down a hacker that never existed.

Weiner paid T&M, a Manhattan-based firm, $13,290 for “legal services” in the fourth quarter of 2011, financial statements filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission reveal.

Sources told the Daily News, however, that Weiner hired T&M — a firm loaded with former NYPD sleuths — when he was in full spin mode over the controversy that eventually led to his resignation from the House.

[...]

Two sources familiar with Weiner’s downfall said the Queens pol told investigators the same story. T&M investigated — and learned Weiner had sent them on a fool’s errand.

“They did their job, and then it was time to sit down with lawyers,” another source said. “Self-denial, it dies a slow death.”

Surprised? No, neither were we.

The married congressman from Queens, NY initially told the public his Twitter and Facebook accounts had been hacked, after a tweet sent to a female college student in Washington state appeared in his public Twitter timeline, complete with a photo of a man’s bulging underpants.

The tweet triggered the unraveling of a series of sexually explicit online messages and additional photos Weiner had shared with numerous women. More than two weeks would pass before Weiner finally came clean about his extracurricular activities.  But not before embarking upon a media blitz to embellish his imaginary tale of hackers and pranksters and other political scapegoats:

“You know, I can’t say with certitude. My system was hacked. Pictures can be manipulated, pictures can be dropped in and inserted,” reported HotAir.

“At a time when the GOP is playing games with the debt limit, a member of the Supreme Court is refusing to recuse himself from matters he has a financial interest in, and middle class incomes are stagnant, many want to change the subject,” Weiner said in a statement emailed to POLITICO by his office. “I don’t. This was a prank, and a silly one. I’m focused on my work.”

Anthony Weiner indicated at the time that he’d asked a firm to look into whether his photos “could have been taken or manipulated,” followed shortly thereafter with the announcement that he’d hired an attorney to explore “civil or criminal actions” in response to the “prank.”  Now we learn that he used campaign funds to try and cover his hide.  And The Hill is reporting that Weiner continued to spend more than $130,000 in campaign cash even after his resignation.

This may be a good time for some to reflect on the unwarranted over-zealous scrutiny that fell upon Andrew Breitbart and other writers associated with these very websites who were accused of targeting, setting up, and/or hacking Congressman Weiner (or other ludicrous conspiracy theories), accusations that are often still repeated today, months after Weiner’s admission and resignation.  And one of the whistleblowers who stuck through the story has since had his life turned upside down, largely as a result of Weiner’s dishonesty (I won’t link to the horrid posts).

Might I remind these same critics that BigGovernment, which first broke the Weinergate scandal, reported the facts and did so responsibly, despite numerous claims to the contrary.  The dishonest party in this story is the one who no longer holds a seat in Congress.  And that’s a fact.

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss Twitter’s decision to sensor tweets, North Dakota’s oil boom and the challenges their rapidly growing economy faces.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

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An 18-year-old high school senior was scolded by her principal after she criticised her state governor in a tweet.

Emma Sullivan, of Fairway, Kansas, was reprimanded by the head of The Shawnee Mission East High School.

She was summoned to the principal’s office and was ordered to apologise to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback.

Emma posted the tweet during a field trip to the state Capitol.

After meeting Mr Brownback, Emma tweeted: ‘Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.’

Mr Brownback’s office contacted the school and complained about the tweet.

The following day Emma wound up in the principal’s office, NBC Action News reports.

She said: ‘He laid into me about how this was unacceptable and an embarrassment.

‘He said I had created this huge controversy and everyone was up in arms about it … and now he had to do damage control.’

She said she was told to write a formal apology to the governor, which so far she hasn’t done.

Emma said: ‘I don’t agree with a majority of the things that he is trying to pass.

‘I believe that it is my right to state my opinion.’

The school’s principal said: ‘This is not about political views since none were given in the tweet – it’s about being respectful with a public official whether we agree or disagree with their viewpoints.’

Read more here. This is exactly wrong. We all have the absolute right to be totally disrespectful to any elected official. That a Governor, like Brownback, should miss this point is completely disheartening.

The movants have not demonstrated that they have a First Amendment right to remain in Zuccotti Park, along with their tents, structures, generators, and other installations to the exclusion of the owner’s reasonable rights and duties to maintain Zuccotti Park, or to the rights to public access of others who might wish to use the space safely. Neither have the applicants shown a right to a temporary restraining order that would restrict the City’s enforcement of law so as to promote public health and safety.

This screencap was soon followed by another supporter’s Tweeting of the judge’s home phone number – see below.

The judge’s phone number has been redacted from this Tweet.

Lets not forget the lessons in civility that our dutiful media and President Obama conveyed in the wake of the Tucson tragedy. The vitriol does not seem to have died down.  Perhaps this video will help remind people what’s lurking out there on the Twitter public timeline about all you “Sons of Bitches” and “Hobbits” of Terror.

I’ll leave you with a message from the video’s creator:  “All tweets posted to Twitter are public. Therefore, I will not remove this video, names or any details that were publicly available. If you can’t stand by your hate, then you should have never said it.”

But this article is not about me. It is about how social media seeks to engage those who have a desire to understand every shift in American politics, but don’t have the luxury of living in the political hotbed of Washington D.C. It does exactly that, but furthermore, it has altered our very perception of the political parties, world leaders, economic, foreign, and social policy, science, and history itself. Our means of communicating ideas has changed dramatically, allowing us to post 140 character statements of the things that matter to us, or create groups on Facebook to promote our beliefs and concerns, or even write lengthy essays on popular websites that push forth certain ideologies. Some would say that this doesn’t affect politics in any significant way, but when simple things, such as a video, have the ability to end corruption at the deepest levels, none can deny just how effective social media has become.

But as we accept just how invaluable social media is to our political discussion, we also must accept just how damaging it can be. While both the Left and the Right have turned to Twitter and Facebook to combat each other, the Left has used these tools more for accusing the Right of immense racism, homophobia, sexism, elitism, and terrorism, and less for espousing rationality and reason. Some even advocated lying for the purposes of winning political debate at one point or another. It isn’t hard to see just how erratic some liberals behave through social networking sites.

Even with the addition of Twitter and Facebook to the equation, blogging is the defined medium for expressing political views. Blogs are where the most impassioned debates on current events take place. Most blogs, such as the ones controlled by new media leaders like Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, Matt Drudge ( and of course this very site ran by our own Andrew Breitbart), have succeeded in presenting a new type of conservative thought, with a fair perspective on our ever shifting political scene. They hold no punches, and at times, are critical of people within our own movement. If only such civility were commonplace throughout the entirety of the blogosphere. Big name liberal sites like Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Talking Points Memo have used soaring rhetoric and violent language when talking about the things that conservatives care most about, and when discussing conservatives themselves.

So does the social media movement hurt or help politics? I would say a little of both. It has made it easier for cowards to hide behind their keyboards and attack decent hardworking people for standing for traditional values, limited government, and personal responsibility. It has spawned numerous ‘hate pages’ targeting people perceived as the most ‘radical’ of the conservative movement ( case in point, this ridiculous array of slurred speech know as Stop Beck), and it allows the Left to use the internet to spread some of the most disgusting lies about the Right. At the hands of liberals, social media is a tool only to be used as a means to destroy the credibility of those who disagree with them.

But through our social connections, we gain the ability to organize and connect with like-minded conservatives who have a desire to take their political activism to the next level. It gave the Tea Party a way to engage hundreds of thousands of people in serious debate over the direction of our country. Even the Pentagon sees how significant it can actually be. It has become one of the most important aspects of our daily lives, and will only continue to influence us in ways we could never have imagined.

So for those who choose to live a life devoid of these exciting tools, it is to you I say this: while I might support your right to attempt to spread your message without social media, the most relevant voices are fast becoming the ones that open up their computers, and log on.

Hall wrote:

• Yelp gets popular? Copy their info; shove Yelp to the bottom of the page and put Google Places and reviews at the top.
• Groupon won’t sell? Spend billions from other businesses to destroy them.
• Twitter and Facebook innovate on search? Take their content, whine when they try and stop you then spend billions to prevent their growth and hopefully destroy them.
• Apple working on a touchscreen smartphone? Spend billions from another business and copy everything you can, down to swipes and apps.
• Need a smartphone operating system with Java. Take Java and use it for your own ends.
• Need a location mapping technology and Skyhook won’t sell? Spend billions from your monopoly profits and strongarm your partners and drive Skyhook out of business.
• Buy up the big travel search sites.
• Claim you are open source but share nothing related to what your business claims to be about — search, and nothing related to how you make your money — advertising
• Claim you are open and standards based but control who gets access to your smartphone operating system

Like all rich monopolists, they spend millions hiring high priced lobbyists and public relations teams inside the Beltway — for their direct benefit.

Hall can add a new bullet to his reasoning with the company’s snatching of Motorola.  The deal will add fuel to the fire on anti-trust investigators who thought Google was too big and powerful before the Motorola acquisition.

But perhaps more significantly is that the purchase of Motorola is another example of Google using its riches to capture market-share, using its power in Washington to see the deal approved and seeing innovation and invention take a back set to crony capitalism driven profits.