Did President Trump predict the demise of Eric Schneiderman back in 2013?
The New York Attorney General resigned on Monday night just hours after being accused of physical violence against multiple women in a bombshell New Yorker story.
Back in 2013, Trump compared Schneiderman to two other New York Democrats whose careers were rocked by sex scandals: Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner.
“Weiner is gone, Spitzer is gone — next will be lightweight A.G. Eric Schneiderman. Is he a crook? Wait and see, worse than Spitzer or Weiner,” Trump tweeted on Sept. 11, 2013.
Weiner is gone, Spitzer is gone – next will be lightweight A.G. Eric Schneiderman. Is he a crook? Wait and see, worse than Spitzer or Weiner
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 11, 2013
Spitzer resigned in 2008 following a prostitution scandal, while Weiner represented New York’s 9th congressional district before sexting scandals in 2011 led to a 21-month sentence and registration as a sex offender.
Just one month before Trump’s prescient tweet, Schneiderman had sued the future president over his Trump University, calling it fraudulent.
“In New York, we have laws against business fraud, we have laws against consumer fraud,” Schneiderman said on “Good Morning America” when asked about the lawsuit filed against Trump in 2013. “We have a law against running an illegal unlicensed university. This never was a university … it was really a fraud from beginning to end.”
While announcing that his plan to step down on Tuesday, Schneiderman said in his resignation statement: “In the last several hours, serious allegations, which I strongly contest, have been made against me. While these allegations are unrelated to my professional conduct or the operations of the office, they will effectively prevent me from leading the office’s work at this critical time.”
Schneiderman, who in February filed a civil rights lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein, was accused of abusing four women, including two who agreed to be named by the New Yorker, Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam.
The women told the magazine that Schneiderman “repeatedly hit them, often after drinking, frequently in bed and never with their consent,” New Yorker writers Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow reported on Monday.
Neither woman took the accusations to police at the time, “but both say that they eventually sought medical attention after having been slapped hard across the ear and face, and also choked,” the report stated.
Schneiderman defended his conduct as “role playing and other consensual sexual activity” undertaken “in the privacy of intimate relationships” in a statement prior to his resignation Monday night. He denied committing assault and said he has “never engaged in nonconsensual sex, which is a line I would not cross.”
His two other accusers remain anonymous.