The tension between Anthony Weiner and the Clintons has been pretty clear since his second round of sexting emerged, but it has all been reported from behind the scenes, especially on the Clintons’ side. On Tuesday, that changed. After Weiner said in his awkward BuzzFeed interview that he knew what role his wife Huma Abedin would play in a possible Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign but, “I’m not telling you,” a Clinton spokesman’s response fairly dripped with scorn: “We have absolutely no clue what he was talking about,” Nick Merrill told Politico. “Maybe his campaign does. Doubt it though.”
While Hillary Clinton and her team have been publicly silent on their rumored dislike for Weiner (he’s been described as “that jerky son-in-law who married in”), Weiner has offered a couple of less-than-reverent quips from the campaign trail. Perhaps most memorably he said he was “not terribly interested in what people who are not voters in the city of New York have to say.”
Asked about Merrill’s comment after Tuesday’s debate, though, Weiner did sound like someone interested in what people thought of him:
“If you read the transcript, the question was, do I know what my wife is doing? And the answer is yes. It was a joke. Have you ever heard, ‘But if I tell you I’d have to kill you?’” he said. “It’s a joke, everyone laughed.”
“I have no insight into campaign 2016 — I’m struggling right here in 2013,” he added.
An apparently exasperated Weiner went on to tell a reporter, “I’ll try to make the jokes more obvious,” before turning away, ABC reported. Hey, it might help. A yuk or two would really help to cut all this tension.
