Anthony Weiner, the former congressman who suffered one of the most spectacular falls from grace in US politics after he was embroiled in a sexting scandal that some blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election, has formally initiated yet another attempt at a comeback.
Weiner, 60, has officially registered as a candidate for a New York City council seat. The filing with the city’s campaign finance board, which was first reported by the New York Post’s Craig McCarthy, marks Weiner’s latest attempt to claw his way back into public office despite his scandal-laced past.
The disgraced politician’s longstanding X account reposted news of the candidate filing on Tuesday with the comment: “Mr Moneybags over here.” The remark was an apparent ironic reference to the fact that he has so far recorded zero dollars in supporters’ donations for his campaign coffers.
In recent weeks, Weiner has been dangling the possibility of an attempted return to public life in front of media outlets, including his own The Middle radio show on WABC. In a recent broadcast, he told his listeners that he still craved public service, addressing his sexual misdeeds, which culminated in him serving 18 months in prison for sexually messaging an underaged girl.
He said on the show that “the things in my past, the things about my addiction, the things about my acting out, the things about my background – it’s a lot, it’s a lot. But we’re at a moment that we Democrats, we seem like we come into knife fights carrying library books all the time.”
Weiner has been assailed by scandal since he crashed out of Congress in 2011 after 13 years representing New Yorkers. His downfall came amid a sexting scandal involving explicit messages sent to several women, as well as the underaged girl.
He made his first comeback pitch in 2013, running for New York mayor, only to flame out again in a renewed scandal over sexual texts sent under the cover name Carlos Danger.
But it was the inadvertent role that Weiner played in Clinton’s agonizing defeat when Donald Trump clinched his first presidency for which Weiner will be most remembered – unflatteringly so – by many Democrats. In 2016, federal prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Weiner’s exchange of lewd photos with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina.
The inquiry became entangled with Clinton’s White House bid because Weiner’s then wife, Huma Abedin, was vice-chair of the Democratic nominee’s presidential campaign. In the course of the investigation into Weiner’s sexting, FBI agents found emails on his personal laptop that led them to reopen an investigation into a private email server used by Clinton.
The investigation, reopened just days before the 2016 election, was rapidly concluded with no incriminating evidence found against Clinton. But the damage had been done as Trump took the decisive electoral college victory despite losing the popular vote.
To this day, Weiner’s sexual misconduct is regarded by many in the Democratic party as a factor behind Clinton’s defeat – and hence Trump’s elevation to the White House, which he retook in the 5 November election against Kamala Harris after losing the 2020 race to Joe Biden.
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” another candidate vying for the city council seat, Sarah Batchu, told the New Republic recently. “But this guy has had third, fourth and fifth chances.”
