He’s back, yet again.
Former congressman Anthony Weiner appears to have officially filed to run for City Council after floating a potential bid for weeks. As first reported by the New York Post, records from the city’s Campaign Finance Board list Weiner as a candidate for the District 2 race to replace term-limited councilmember Carlina Rivera.
It marks a return to public life for a veteran politician who has spent most of the last decade in relative anonymity after a series of scandals wrecked his once-promising career. Weiner resigned from the House of Representatives in 2011 amid an extramarital-sexting scandal that became public due to an errant lewd selfie posted on Twitter. A second scandal emerged in 2013 when a website shared screenshots of explicit messages between him and another woman. That torpedoed his run for mayor, in which he was briefly leading polls. Most seriously, in 2017, Weiner was sentenced to 21 months in prison after sending sexually explicit content to an underage girl. Weiner was ultimately released after serving 18 months.
His legal trouble inadvertently became a plotline of the 2016 presidential election following the discovery of emails between Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Weiner’s then-wife, Huma Abedin, a top Clinton staffer, on one of his seized devices. FBI director James Comey announced his intent to reopen the agency’s investigation into Clinton’s emails just weeks before the election, a controversial move that many cite as a reason for the former secretary of State’s eventual loss to Donald Trump.
Before serving in Congress, Weiner was a member of the City Council from 1992 to 1998. When he was first elected, at age 27, he was the youngest member of the body. He then succeeded his former boss Chuck Schumer as representative for Ninth Congressional District in 1999, holding the Brooklyn-based seat for 12 years. During his time in the House of Representatives, Weiner launched the first of two mayoral bids, placing second in the Democratic primary in 2005. (He came in fifth place during his subsequent campaign in 2013.)
In recent interviews, Weiner had indicated an interest in running for the open Council seat. “I was removed from society for 18 months and five days, and for years I have lived as a civilian in this neighborhood. Maybe this campaign will be an opportunity for me to engage those people, even if they do not like what I did,” he told the New York Times.
Weiner joins an already growing field of candidates to represent the district, including Assemblymember Harvey Epstein, Manhattan Community Board 3 chair Andrea Gordillo, and nonprofit leader Sarah Batchu.
