Weiner expressed deep remorse for embarrassing his wife. Tearful Weiner eyes comeback

In a sweeping confessional interview published Wednesday, Anthony Weiner provided his first explanation of the bizarre behavior that led to his downfall, compared his wife’s circumstance to that of Hillary Clinton’s after the Monica Lewinsky scandal — and acknowledged he’s eagerly looking at a political comeback this year.

The New York Times Magazine interview with Weiner and his wife, Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, has been the talk of New York’s political world for the past week. It is a building block of a political return by the former Queens congressman, who resigned after admitting that a lewd tweet sent from his account, which he’d claimed had been hacked, was in fact his own doing.


The piece is the first time Weiner and Abedin have spoken at length about the rapid-fire events of 2011 that led him to resign his seat: the tweet he sent thinking it was a private message, the exposure by Andrew Breitbart’s site, the days of claiming he was the victim of a crime and then the ultimate, tearful confession at a Midtown press conference.

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Weiner was emotional again in the interview, expressing deep remorse for wounding and embarrassing his wife. But the interview is unlikely to quell further questions about his lies to reporters and his constituents about having been the victim of a crime.

Were Weiner to run, it would be one of the most remarkable comeback efforts launched in a short time frame, as New York City prepares for the post-Giuliani, post-Bloomberg era with a Democratic mayoral field generally regarded as weak.

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Among the highlights from the interview, which was posted Wednesday morning:

• Weiner insisted that while he’s considering a run, it’s no longer the “burning, overriding desire” it once was for him. But he said he knows the clock is ticking – and that Abedin is coming around to the idea he should do it.

“I do recognize, to some degree, it’s now or maybe never for me, in terms of running for something. I’m trying to gauge not only what’s right and what feels comfortable right this second, but I’m also thinking, ‘How will I feel in a year or two years or five years?’ Is this the time that I should be doing it? And then there’s the other side of the coin, which is … am I still the same person who I thought would make a good mayor?’’

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He said he wants people “to give me a second chance … I think to some degree I do want to say to them, ‘Give me another chance.’”

Weiner also may not be running to win, but rather to try to exorcise the demons of 2011 — both for his own family’s sake and the sake of a potential future run. His main aim is to become mayor, but he suggested in the piece — as he has to many Democrats in the city in recent days — that he is also looking at a run for city comptroller.

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He said his own polling shows him as “the underdog in any race” he enters, and that while people might be ready to offer him redemption, that doesn’t mean they’ll grant him their votes.

“And there’s a healthy number of people who will never get over it. … It’s a little complicated because I always attracted a fairly substantial amount of people who didn’t like me anyway,” he told the magazine.

• Weiner addresses at length his sexless sex scandal as the result of new media gone awry in the mind of a narcissistic politician.

“For a thoughtful person, it’s remarkable how little thought I really gave to it until it was too late. But I think a lot of it came down to: I was in a world and a profession that had me wanting people’s approval. By definition, when you are a politician, you want people to like you, you want people to respond to what you’re doing, you want to learn what they want to hear so you can say it to them,” he said.

“Twitter and Facebook allowed for me — not only could I go to a town-hall meeting or a senior center or in front of the TV camera, but now I could sit and hear what people were saying all around. Search your name on Google begat read comments on your Facebook page, begat looking at what people are saying about you on Twitter, to then trying to engage them.”

“I wasn’t really thinking,” Weiner said. “What does this mean that I’m doing this? Is this risky behavior? Is this smart behavior? To me, it was just another way to feed this notion that I want to be liked and admired.’’

• In therapy, the former congressman says he got no easy explanation for his behavior, such as sex addiction, although he talked about not enjoying being “still” or alone.

‘‘It’s clear it wasn’t because I didn’t love Huma,” he told the magazine. “It wasn’t because there’s anything about my relationship with Huma that was missing that I was looking for elsewhere. Even that would be pat, kind of understandable on some level.’’

Twitter was the enabler, he suggested. “And if it wasn’t 2011 and it didn’t exist, it’s not like I would have gone out cruising bars or something like that. It was just something that technology made possible and it became possible for me to do stupid things.”

• Abedin spoke to Hillary Clinton — who, after working with Abedin for almost two decades, is like an extended family member — after the scandal.

Declining to go into detail, Abedin said the entire Clinton clan had supported her and added that Clinton has said in the past: “At the very least, every woman should have the ability and the confidence and the choice to make whatever decisions she wants to make that are right for her and not be judged by it.’’

Weiner seconded this, comparing Abedin — who had stood by her husband as the victim of a conspiracy, as he initially claimed to be — to Clinton herself during the Lewinsky scandal.

‘‘If you read Hillary’s biography of the time,’’ he said in the interview, ‘‘she speaks pretty frankly about believing that there were people out to get her husband — ‘I believe him, I’m going to stand in there, I’m going to tell friends that it’s bull’ — and the way she felt when she found out the truth.”

The traditionally media-shy Abedin talked about the process of forgiving her husband, who admitted to lying about having been hacked — a fact his former House colleagues continue to hold against him — but insisted it was to protect his then-pregnant wife from knowing the truth.

Speaking with candor, she said, ‘‘At the time, we were very early in our marriage, but it was an old friendship. He was my best friend. In addition to that, I loved him. There was a deep love there, but it was coupled with a tremendous feeling of betrayal. It took a lot of work, both mentally and in the way we engage with each other, for me to get to a place where I said: ‘OK, I’m in. I’m staying in this marriage.’

“Here was a man I respected, I loved, was the father of this child inside of me, and he was asking me for a second chance,” she added. “And I’m not going to say that was an easy or fast decision that I made. It’s been almost two years now. I did spend a lot of time saying and thinking: ‘I. Don’t. Understand.’ And it took a long time to be able to sit on a couch next to Anthony and say, ‘OK, I understand and I forgive.’ It was the right choice for me. I didn’t make it lightly.’’

• Weiner’s brother Jason told the Times that the former lawmaker has changed, pointing to the former congressman’s becoming the father of a son, Jordan, now a toddler.

‘‘I wouldn’t stand for other people saying this about him,” Jason Weiner said, “but there was definitely a douchiness about him that I just don’t really see anymore.’’