Former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner has been released from prison and is now in a federal re-entry program, according to records from the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Weiner was released after serving 18 months of his 21-month sentence for sending explicit text messages and photos to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. His release was granted early on good conduct, and he is now being supervised by Residential Reentry Management in New York. Weiner will have to pay a $10,000 fine, spend three years on supervised release, and register as a sex offender.
Once a rising Democrat in Congress, Weiner was forced to resign in 2011 after a series of sexting scandals. Two years later, Weiner attempted to rehabilitate his image by running for mayor of New York City, but the campaign was derailed by yet another sexting scandal. The demise of the campaign was captured in the documentary “Weiner,” which premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and began shooting before the scandal made headlines.
Later that year, reports surfaced that Weiner had knowingly sent explicit photos to an underage girl, and that federal officials had seized Weiner’s laptop. As the laptop contained emails from Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, who was working on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the seizure prompted then-FBI head James Comey to reopen an investigation into Clinton’s email servers less than two weeks before the presidential election.
Weiner pled guilty in May 2017 to a charge of transferring obscene material to a minor, with Abedin filing for divorce that same day. The divorce filing was later removed to settle matters out of court.