Former New York City Councilman, mayoral candidate and U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner was sentenced to 21 months in prison on Monday.
The sentence comes after Weiner was found guilty of transferring obscene material to a minor, a charge that stemmed from illicit conversations Weiner had with a girl he knew to be 15-years-old via various social media platforms.
In a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Acting Attorney for Manhattan Joon H. Kim announced that Anthony Weiner would serve 21 months in prison as well as three years of supervised release. He will also be required to register as a sex offender.
“Anthony Weiner, a former congressman and candidate for mayor, asked a girl who he knew to be 15 years old to display her naked body and engage in sexually explicit behavior for him online. Justice demands that this type of conduct be prosecuted and punished with time in prison. Today, Anthony Weiner received a just sentence that was appropriate for his crime,” Kim said.
This is just the most recent trouble that Weiner has faced due to his online behavior.
In 2011 Weiner was embroiled in a scandal where he tweeted sexually explicit photos to a woman. Weiner denied the allegations before holding a press conference admitting to having several similar exchanges in the past. He later resigned from Congress.
After rehabilitating his image and returning to politics with a bid for New York City mayor, Weiner was again exposed as having sent explicit photos of himself to another woman under the alias “Carlos Danger” in July of 2013.
Weiner’s rocky marriage to top Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin finally hit the skids in 2016 after yet another allegation of explicit text exchanges. This came only a short time before Weiner’s exchanges with the minor to whom he was found guilty of transferring obscene material.
The federal investigation into Weiner’s illicit communications brought emails pertinent to the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email servers to light, causing then-FBI Director James Comey to announce he was reopening the investigation just days before the 2016 presidential election.
