After delivering brief testimony about the state of public housing at an event this evening, former Congressman Anthony Weiner was again mobbed by reporters seeking more answers about the online sex scandal that continues to unfold.
And, when asked about the last 24 hours of his life, Mr. Weiner didn’t pretend it’s been easy.
“It’s been rough. These are things I brought upon myself,” Mr. Weiner solemnly told reporters. “And I thought they were going to come out towards the end of the campaign. And some of them have. So look, I’m pressing forward. I’m running a campaign based on issues. I’m going to keep doing that.”
Still, some observers–including several of his electoral rivals who have called on him to drop out of the mayor’s race–have expressed concerns that Mr. Weiner’s bad judgment in his personal life would undermine his ability to function if he were elected mayor of New York City.
“I think it’s a fair question,” Mr. Weiner said on the topic. “People have to answer that question for themselves.”
Yesterday, Mr. Weiner admitted to continuing to have sexually explicit conversations with women he had never met long after his resignation–including on the heels of a People magazine profile in which he and his family had posed happily and claimed the former congressman was a changed man. Politicker asked Mr. Weiner how people were supposed to trust him in light of this masking of the truth.
“Look I have–I’ve been telling people all along to take a look at the full record of the things I’ve done, the things that I’ve proposed,” he replied, pivoting to his issues-based approach once again. “And I think I’ve been getting a pretty good response because citizens are interested in my ideas for the city, the middle class and those struggling to make it.”
Pressed about whether it was dishonest at the time, he said, “No look, I was going through some things personally. My family was. And we tried to be as honest about it where we were at the time. But, this—this thing was still there and it, as I said over an extended period of time, it ended, it’s behind me.”
“What the reports are in the paper today are basically something that was a year ago,” he added. “And it’s in my past and something that I wasn’t explicit enough about the specific dates of when I thought these revelations would come out and what they were about. And I guess that’s my mistake.”
During the exchange, which lasted less than five minutes, Mr. Weiner didn’t respond to repeated questions from reporters about the existence of other online aliases or how many women he’d sent lewd messages to.
He did, however, provide a rough date for when the sexting ended.
“Last summer,” he said. “Yeah, roughly August. Maybe even a little earlier than that.”
