Anthony Weiner (4 September 1964-) was a member of the US House of Representatives (D-NY 9) from 3 January 1999 to 21 June 2011, succeeding Chuck Schumer and preceding Bob Turner.
Biography[]
Anthony Weiner was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York in 1964, and he worked as a staffer for Democratic congressman Chuck Schumer before running for City Council in 1991. At age 27, Weiner became the youngest councilman in the city's history, and he focused on quality-of-life improvement, such as putting troubled teens to work cleaning up graffiti and overseeing the revival of the historic Sheepshead Bay area. After Schumer was elected to the US Senate in 1999, Weiner was elected to the US House of Representatives to fill Schumer's seat, and he was strongly pro-choice, cofounded the Congressional Middle Class Caucus, supported expanding Medicare to all Americans regardless of age, supported public insurance (and claimed that every Republican he had ever met was a "wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry"), pressured YouTube to remove Anwar al-Awlaki's videos from its website in 2010, opposed tax cuts, supported the Iraq War, was staunchly pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian, and had one of the highest staff turnover rates in the US Congress due to his high-decibel speaking level and his occasional angry outbursts. Weiner attracted further controversy after he accidentally revealed his habit of sexting several women (despite being married to Huma Abedin) by tweeting a publicly-available explicit link to a female follower on his Twitter in 2011, and he resigned from Congress as a result. In 2013, Weiner attempted a political comeback by running for Mayor of New York City, and he was an early leader in the race before it was revealed that his sexting had continued under the pseudonym "Carlos Danger". In 2016, after it was revealed that Weiner had sexted a Trump-supporting female acquaintance of his a photo of himself laying in bed with his sleeping son, Abedin announced her separation from Weiner, and, after it was revealed that Weiner had sexted with a 15-year-old girl from North Carolina, Weiner's devices were seized by the FBI in September 2016. The discovery of emails pertinent to Hillary Clinton's email controversy led to FBI Director James Comey reopening an investigation into Clinton on the eve of the 2016 presidential election, costing her the election. On 19 May 2017, Weiner surrendered to the FBI and, on 25 September 2017, was sentenced to 21 months in prison and three years of supervision for transferring obscene material to a minor. He was released on 17 February 2019 and sent to a halfway house, and he was forced to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.