Sex offender ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner denies his underage sexting scandal cost Hillary Clinton 2016 election
REGISTERED sex-offender Anthony Weiner has denied his underage sexting scandal led to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election.
The disgraced former Congressman, 56, made illicit online contact with a 15-year-old girl, which led to a FBI investigation in which agents found emails from Hillary Clinton’s secret server.
The investigation roiled Clinton’s campaign because emails she had sent to her close aide and the congressman’s now ex-wife Huma Abedin were found on a laptop that FBI agents had seized from Weiner.
Just 11 days before the election, then FBI-director James Comey announced that they would be re-opening an investigation into the former First Lady’s private email server citing the laptop.
“When you lose the election by 40,000 votes, or whatever it is, people come up with a lot of reasons that they think Trump was elected,” Weiner told NBC New York.
Clinton had said that Comey’s letter to Congress was a key factor in her defeat to Trump.
The 56-year-old said he is leaving politics and his scandals behind him as he is CEO of glass countertops firm Ice Stone.
When asked if he still tweets, he told NBC: “No I don’t have a Twitter account, I don’t have Instagram. I don’t have any social media. There were a lot of bad habits that I no longer have in my life, thank God, one day at a time.”
President Trump compared files allegedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop with the explicit snaps found on Weiner’s laptop by the FBI, Newsweek reports.
Files on the laptop with a Biden Foundation sticker allegedly connected former vice president Joe Biden to business deals in Ukraine, according to the New York Post.
“Between Anthony Weiner’s laptop and this laptop”, Trump said, referring to the computer, “these are two beauties. I think this one could be worse than the Weiner laptop.”
The ex-politician represented New York’s 9th congressional district from 1999 to 2011, when he announced his resignation after several photos of a scantily-clad Weiner were published by TNZ.
The first scandal, dubbed Weinergate, erupted when he used Twitter to send an explicit picture to a woman aged 21 in Seattle, Washington.
He denied media reports that he had posted the image but did concede to sending a link to the photo and other explicit pictures to women both before and after he wed Huma Abedin, a close aide and personal friend of Mrs Clinton.
He also texted a girl, aged 17 from Delaware, which was investigated by cops. Although he admitted communicating with the girl, he denied sending inappropriate messages.
A shirtless, cropped picture of Weiner was sent to another woman over the internet. He admitted to sending more images, one of which was sexually graphic.
Weiner held a press conference to apologize and admitted he had “engaged in several inappropriate conversations” over social media and had exchanged explicit messages with “about six women over three years”.
He denied having any physical relationship with any of the women but the disgraced politician was forced to resign from Congress in 2011.
The second scandal blew up in 2013 during his campaign to become mayor of New York City.
He was alleged to have used the alias Carlos Danger when he sent pictures to a 22-year-old woman during 2012 and 2013.
He admitted sexting three women after his resignation from Congress and said there had been “six to ten” in total. He did not drop out of the mayoral race but lost decisively instead.
In August 2016, a MailOnline investigation revealed that Weiner had been sexting a 15-year-old girl. And it was the FBI’s investigation into his electronic devices which is believed to have been behind the relaunch of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.
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Weiner was sentenced to 21 months in jail in 2017 after pleading guilty to the charges. He was released from federal custody last year after serving 18 months.
At the time, US District Judge Denise Cote said: “This is a serious crime that deserves serious punishment.
“Weiner has a disease. He has a compulsivity. Some say a sex addiction.”
