Monday, the first high-profile Clinton family insider in 2017 is heading to prison — and hopefully he’s not the last.
Former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, husband to Hillary Clinton’s top adviser Huma Abedin, deserves two years in prison, prosecutors said Wednesday.
A Manhattan judge is scheduled to sentence the New York Democrat on Monday.
Unfortunately, his case doesn’t link directly to the Clintons. Weiner was found guilty of transferring obscene material to a minor.
Weiner has asked for mercy. He claims that since he was arrested and convicted for engaging in sexting with a 15-year-old girl, he has been reformed.
Prosecutors, however, urged the judge to put Weiner’s claims of a therapeutic awakening in a context of a man who made similar claims after embarrassing, widely publicized interactions with adult women in the past.
FILE – In a Friday, May 19, 2017 file photo, former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner leaves Federal court, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
“This is not merely a ‘sexting’ case,” prosecutors wrote. “The defendant did far more than exchange typed words on a lifeless cellphone screen with a faceless stranger. … Weiner’s criminal conduct was very serious, and the sentence imposed should reflect that seriousness.”
Prosecutors attacked some of Weiner’s arguments for seeking leniency and noted his full awareness that what he was doing was a crime, citing his hypocritical co-sponsorship in January 2007 of a bill to require sex offenders to register their email and instant message addresses with the National Sex Offender Registry.
“While the government does not contend that Weiner engaged in inappropriate sexual exchanges with other minors or that he is a pedophile, his professed ambivalence toward the minor victim’s age is belied by the defendant’s own statements to the court-appointed evaluator during his evaluation,” they said.
The government said Weiner’s “widely-reported prior scandals” were not criminal in nature and did not involve minors — but their context should be considered at sentencing because they reveal a familiar pattern of deviance.
“He initially denied his conduct; he suffered personal and professional consequences; he publicly apologized and claimed reform. Yet, he has, on multiple occasions, continued to engage in the very conduct he swore off, progressing from that which is self-destructive to that which is also destructive to a teenage girl,” prosecutors said.
They added: “Weiner’s demonstrated history of professed, yet failed, reform make it difficult to rely on his present claim of self-awareness and transformation.”
No matter what he says, though, Weiner is heading to prison. As part of a plea bargain, the Clinton insider has agreed not to appeal any sentence between 21 and 27 months. Prosecutors said the sentence should fall within that span, and they noted that Probation Department authorities had recommended a 27-month prison term.
For many years, opponents of the Clinton empire have longed to read those words.
Though the case isn’t directly connected to the Clinton family’s political corruption, the conviction of this known pedophile speaks to the kind of person they surround themselves with.
Next target: Hillary herself.
Comment “LOCK HER UP!” below if you think Hillary should be in jail, too!
The Associated Press contributed to this article