Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former pol who filed to run for a Lower East Side City Council seat last week, told amNewYork Metro he will not ask voters to support him “in spite” of his torrid history — but “in part because of it.”
Weiner appears to be re-entering the political fray, having filed a campaign committee with the city Campaign Finance Board on Friday, a little over a decade after his mayoral campaign imploded due to the second of two sexting scandals that torpedoed political career. He subsequently served 18 months in prison following his conviction for sending sexually explicit text messages to a minor.
Weiner’s filing was first reported by the New York Post on Tuesday.
But the former congressman, who represented Brooklyn and Queens between 1998 and 2011, said in a phone interview that while his past scandals will hardly be the focus of his prospective campaign, he intends to face them head-on.
“I am not going to ask people to vote for me in spite of my journey and my history,” Weiner told amNewYork Metro. “I’m going to ask them to vote for me, in part, because of it. If people want to talk to me about it, and they want to ask about my struggles, and they want to talk about addiction, and how that looks, and about my time in rehab or in prison, they’re welcome to do it…All I can do is try to pursue it with as much rigorous honesty as I can muster.”
He added that his scandals have not so far been a “big topic of conversation” when he speaks to voters.
Weiner said he sees the filing as “exploratory” and that he is still weighing whether to fully jump into the race. The decision to make that filing, he explained, was to meet the criteria for a candidates’ forum hosted by the Downtown Independent Democrats that he wishes to attend.
In deciding whether to run, Weiner said he wanted to “see if people are responding to my ideas, see if they respond to me.” At the moment, he said he has some campaign volunteers but no paid staff.
Speculation that the former pol would mount a political comeback began swirling shortly after Republican President-elect Donald Trump won the presidential election in November. In a Nov. 11 spot on his WABC-AM 770 radio show, Weiner explained what he sees as the top issues with the Democratic party. He also noted that people in his district have asked him if he is running for office.
If Weiner commits to running, he will enter a race that already includes half a dozen candidates vying to replace term-limited Council Member Carlina Rivera. Other prominent contenders include Assembly Member Harvey Epstein (D-Manhattan) and Andrea Gordillo, chair of Manhattan Community Board 3.
Weiner said he is unfamiliar with the other candidates he could run against.
“I don’t know much about the field. I only recently met them,” he said.
Fodder for attacks
Even if Weiner faces his salacious history head-on, it will likely be fodder for relentless attacks from his opponents.
Weiner’s first scandal took place in 2011, when the discovery that he had been exchanging lewd texts with multiple women led him to resign from Congress. He then resurfaced to run for mayor in 2013, presenting himself as a changed man — but was once again brought down by the discovery that he had continued sending women sexually explicit texts.
Then, in 2016, federal investigators discovered that Weiner was sexting a 15-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty to one felony count of transferring obscene material to a minor in 2017 and was sentenced to 21 months in prison, of which he served 18.
Not long after the verdict came down, Weiner’s then-wife, Huma Abedin, filed for divorce. Abedin was a top adviser on former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and the probe into Weiner led federal investigators to reopen an inquiry into Clinton’s emails — a move many saw as costing her the election to Trump.
