Disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner has been sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for exchanging lewd text messages with a 15-year-old girl, a case which sunk his marriage to Huma Abedin and rattled Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.
Weiner’s lawyer Arlo Devlin-Brown asked the court for a more lenient sentence, claiming that Weiner was “at the depths of an uncontrolled sickness” which he “has made enormous progress in addressing,” and casting his underage correspondent as a schemer “looking to generate material for a book.” The court, apparently, did not agree; the sentence was in line with what prosecutors had sought.
At the same time, Weiner apologized for his behavior.
“I am profoundly sorry to her,” he wrote in a letter to the court. “I was selfish. I have no excuse for what I did to her.”
Once a rising star in the Democratic Party, Weiner repeatedly derailed his career with sexual scandal after sexual scandal. In 2011, he accidentally posted a lewd picture to his official Twitter account, leading to his resignation from Congress a month later. In 2013, while Weiner was trying to mount a political comeback, it was revealed he had exchanged sexual texts with as many as 10 women under the alias “Carlos Danger.”
A federal investigation into the accusations that he had a monthslong online relationship with a 15-year-old girl, a story that broke in September 2016, led the FBI to new information about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, which caused them to reopen that investigation immediately before the election. In her new book What Happened, Clinton ranks this reopening among the many things that cost her the presidential election.
