Weiner’s Deception on When (and Why) He Came Clean
This June 2011 calendar plays a central role in what you are about to read.
Our own Sammy Finkelman noticed an interesting discrepancy between Anthony Weiner’s statements at his June 2011 press conference, and the story told by him and Huma Abedin to the New York Times in an April 2013 puff piece.
The puff piece portrayed Weiner as coming clean with his wife the “weekend” before his Monday, June 6, 2011 press conference:
By June 1, when Weiner said, “I can’t say with certitude” if the picture was of him, it was clear, at least to most of the world, that he was guilty of something. That weekend, Weiner and Abedin escaped to a friend’s house in the Hamptons to get away from all the “hoopla,” as Weiner calls it, “and that’s when people starting coming out of the woodwork. I got a call from Chris Cuomo saying that they had someone who was going to say that I texted with her. It reached this point where I just sat down with Huma and said, ‘Listen, I can’t. . . . I don’t want to lie.’ . . . I just didn’t want to lie anymore to her.” Here, his voice cracks and tears well up in his eyes. “I have a choppy memory of it, but she was devastated. She immediately said, ‘Well you’ve got to stop lying to everyone else too.’ And basically we drove back to the city, and she said: ‘You’ve just got to tell everyone the truth. Telling me doesn’t help any.’ It was brutal. It was completely out of control. There was the crime, there was the cover-up, there was harm I had done to her. And there’s no one who deserved this less than Huma. That’s really the bottom line. No one deserved to have a dope like me do that less than she did.”
It happened on the weekend, did it, Rep. Weiner? Just a crisis of conscience, was it, buddy? Let’s read on:
Abedin’s memory of this moment is a little sharper. “The weekend was over, we’re about to leave, the car is packed, and Anthony said: ‘I have something to tell you. I can’t lie to you anymore. It’s true. It’s me. The picture is me. I sent it. Yes, these stories about the other women are true.’ And it was every emotion that one would imagine: rage and anger and shock. But more than anything else, in the immediate, it was disbelief. The thing that I consciously remember saying over and over and over again is: ‘I don’t understand. What is going on? What’s happening to our lives?’ ”
We’re getting closer to the truth, but this is still deceptive. “The weekend was over” to most people would suggest that he came clean on Sunday night (June 5) just before they headed back, as most people drive back on the Sunday night of a weekend trip.
That’s not what he said the next day, though.
Here’s from Weiner’s Monday, June 6, 2011 press conference:
WEINER: My wife has known about some of these on-line relationships since before we were married. And we spoke frankly about them because — well, we spoke frankly about them. But she didn’t know until this morning that I had not been telling the truth about whether I posted the Twitter posting last week.
Look at the calendar. The weekend was June 3-5. The press conference was on Monday, June 6, which is not typically thought of as “the weekend.”
Either he told her over the weekend (as he told the New York Times) or he told her on the morning of June 6 (as he said at his press conference).
Why does it matter whether he told her about it over the weekend or on Monday morning?
I’ll tell you why: because early Monday morning, June 6, 2011, Andrew Breitbart published an article proving that Weiner had sexted with Meagan Broussard..
I can’t think of a reason that Weiner would have lied at the press conference about telling Huma on Monday morning.
But I can think of a reason why he would falsely try to suggest he came clean over the “weekend”: to falsely suggest that his confession was motivated by a noble desire to tell the truth, rather than forced by Andrew Breitbart.
I spoke to Andrew Breitbart on the phone on Sunday, June 5, 2011, and he told me what he had, and that it was going to be coming out the next day. He allowed me to tease it in an update to this June 5, 2011 post as well as another stand-alone post, published at 10:57 p.m. on June 5, 2011, quoting a tweet of Andrew’s saying “#Weinergate taking new turn tomorrow in AM.”
Breitbart published his first piece early on June 6. A commenter of mine noted by 3:48 a.m. Pacific on June 6, 2011 that Breitbart’s story was up.
That’s what caused old Anthony Weiner to ‘fess up.
Naturally, his confession was portrayed in the New York Times as prompted by Weiner’s super-honest and not-at-all-coerced-by-revelations confession to his wife over the “weekend.”
But that was a lie. His hand was forced Monday morning by Andrew Breitbart. Period. If Breitbart had not published, Weiner would have kept lying about the original Weinertweet.
And then in the summer of 2012, he started sexting and lying again. I guess he thought he could get away with it . . . now that Breitbart was dead.
UPDATE: You know he’s probably sexting RIGHT NOW, telling a woman he wished they wouldn’t have fuzzed up the images of his penis on TheDirty.com, so she could see just what he wants to gag her with.
I’m deleting a portion of the update that was up for a couple of minutes because it relied on a Breitbart.com post which has now disappeared without explanation, which appears to be what they do these days when they screw up. I don’t really trust that site any more.