Rep. Steve Cohen D-Tenn. was recently caught deleting tweets that were supposed to be direct messages to a 24-year-old woman who attended Texas State University and as Paul Bedard noted yesterday is now a model.

Here are some of the more controversial tweets – now deleted:

“Miss u / will call later – give me a good time / on Mississippi River Coast Guard now. Love you.”

“Nice to know you were watchin SOTU (State of the Union) Happy Valentines beautiful girl. Ilu.”

Cohen’s communications director Michael Pagan defends the tweets to the Daily Intelligencer explaining that Cohen was simply communicating with the daughter of a friend and that it was “private.”

“She is the daughter of a longtime friend and they’re pretty much like family,” said Pagan, “He’s known her pretty much her whole life.”

But if you were Cohen’s friend, wouldn’t you be disturbed that he was privately messaging “I love you” to your daughter?

Not Cohen’s communications director:

“I don’t think so,” Pagan insists to the Intelligencer. “Not in my personal opinion.”

Update: NBC News reports that the woman Cohen was sending messages to on Twitter is actually his secret daughter - previously unknown to the public.