Perhaps inspired by Donald Trump’s return to the White House after a crippling 2020 defeat, the registered sex offender and disgraced ex-lawmaker Anthony Weiner says he’s now weighing a political comeback of his own.
Weiner, who spent nearly two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to sending obscene material to a minor, said on his weekly radio show Saturday that he may launch a run at a city council seat in lower Manhattan.
“I’m thinking about it,” he said, according to City & State NY. “I’m wrestling with it. I love doing this job on the radio, but I want to be of service.”
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Weiner, a 60-year-old Democrat, said he feels driven to return to public office because his party-mates are coming “into knife fights carrying library books.” He added that he feels impassioned to combat issues like crime, homelessness, and the housing shortage in his hometown.
Weiner was on the New York City Council from 1992 to 1998 before he was elected to New York’s 9th congressional district in 1999. He won re-election every two years until he resigned in 2011 amid a sexting scandal that involved him sending bulging snaps of his boxers to multiple women and a teenage minor on Twitter.
The Brooklyn native tried to make a comeback in 2013 with a NYC mayoral run, but that too was derailed by a new sexting scandal. He ultimately finished a distant fifth in the Democratic primary.
Weiner eventually pleaded guilty to sexting a 15-year-old girl in 2017 and he was sent to spend 21 months in the clink. It was that same year that his then-wife, the former Hillary Clinton adviser Huma Abedin, filed for divorce after seven years of marriage and took custody of their elementary aged son.
Despite a lengthy rap-sheet that’d surely kill any political career, Weiner apparently still thinks he has a shot at taking over the seat from the term-limited Carlina Rivera.
“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,” he conceded, according to City & State NY. “But we’re at a moment that we Democrats, we seem like we come into knife fights carrying library books all the time.”
