Wiener Sexting
Set-Up?
Last Friday, Anthony Weiner, former New York congressman and then-husband of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, accepted a plea deal in a Manhattan courtroom to a formal charge of “transfer of obscene material to a minor.”
It is beginning to look like a set-up.
WhoWhatWhy lays out the back story as it has appeared in the press:
The official narrative is that Weiner, husband of Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin, had exchanged explicit messages with a 15-year-old girl. The FBI got involved, seized Weiner’s laptop and discovered emails from Clinton on the hard drive. This caused FBI Director James Comey to inform Congress that new evidence had been unearthed in the investigation of Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.
She never recovered from the revelation, which ended up yielding no new information in the case, but, with the scandal fresh in the minds of voters, Donald Trump went on to his astonishing come-from-behind victory.
The North Carolina teenager at the center of the controversy was reported to be heartbroken. A self-described supporter of Clinton, she expressed regret over the role she had played in the election’s outcome.
It’s a story that appalled and infuriated a nation. And, as WhoWhatWhy discovered, it was built on lies:
• The girl was presented in news accounts — and Weiner’s plea deal — as being 15 at the time, that is, under the age of consent in her state. She was not.
• Weiner’s victim and her family were not, as represented, Clinton fans — they actually were strong Trump enthusiasts. Her story was trusted in part because she was characterized as having no axe to grind with Clinton or the Democrats.
• Weiner’s “sexting” partner was not simply a victim. Contrary to tabloid accounts, she initiated the contact with Weiner. And she went out of her way to seek advice from a GOP-associated figure behind prior efforts to harm Weiner and other Democrats.
We encourage you to read the entire article (which has been picked up by The Hill), but we do want to highlight this section:
Incidentally, another falsehood that emanated directly from the original Daily Mail article — that her father is an attorney — found its way into a May 9, 2017, New Yorker piece. The source for this inaccuracy was Sydney Leathers, a woman who had similarly wooed Weiner toward self destructive online behavior, back in 2013. Leathers, who last year helped arrange for press coverage of the younger girl’s allegations, claimed that the girl’s father helped negotiate a fee from the Daily Mail, which reputedly occasionally pays for interviews. The notion that the father was an attorney seemed to give the account greater legitimacy. …
Seeing that Weiner is both a repeat offender — his sexting addiction cost him his job in Congress as well as a shot at becoming mayor of New York — and associated with one of the most important people in Clinton’s inner circle, it is conceivable that this was a set-up from the beginning, with the objective of embarrassing the Clinton campaign.
There is little downside to getting an attractive teenager to reach out to Weiner and wait for him to take the bait. If that is the case, then those involved were successful beyond their wildest imaginations.
It was Leathers, and another curious figure, Charles C. “Chuck” Johnson, an infamous alt-right cyber provocateur, who teamed up to put the girl in contact with the Daily Mail. (Johnson would later claim in an interview with WhoWhatWhy that he was also responsible for a group of Bill Clinton sexual accusers appearing at the October 9 debate — which was intended to rattle Hillary Clinton and generated enthusiastic coverage by pro-Trump media.)
Johnson is wired into a network of high-ranking Trump confidantes, including Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and Blackwater Mercenary Group founder Erik Prince, and Steve Bannon. He is especially close to Prince, who has allies across law enforcement including the FBI, telling WhoWhatWhy that the two are “friends” who speak “once a week.”
Shortly after the election, Sydney Leathers expressed remorse for helping put Donald “Grab ’em by the Pussy” in the Oval Office – and her guilt may have more to do than what she admitted in her chat with Daily Beast.
You should also check out further stories about Chuck Johnson, a documented dirty trickster, racist, and stalker.
But if you read this blog regularly, you know that already.
