Anthony Weiner: ‘It’s Ridiculous for Me to Get Charged with a Crime and To Do Prison Sentence for the Things that I Did’

WEINER: “It’s ridiculous for me to get charged with a crime and to do prison sentence for the things that I did.”
HOST: “You — you think that?”
WEINER: “Well, no one — “
HOST: “Is that your claim?”
WEINER: “Well, no one generally gets prosecuted. No one in the Southern District has ever been sentenced for obscenity, for transferring obscene material. So I did — I did learn that there is an element of prosecutorial discretion that I think everyone should be concerned about, that people being made examples of and the idea of people over incarcerated, I learned. I was a very privileged person to be in that system, but I experienced a lot of men in that system who were also charged with things they probably shouldn’t have been, for periods of time that they shouldn’t have, and their inability to get a trial, a fair trial because of the trial penalty in the federal system. So I learned a lot about that stuff that informs how I talk about this stuff today.”
HOST: “What was your experience being incarcerated like?”
WEINER: “It was hard. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
HOST: “How did you politic?”
WEINER: “I formed relationships with a lot of different elements inside. Like, there were guys at the prison library, these more senior black guys, and I would kibitz with them about what’s going on in Washington, I’ve worked in the rec yard, and so, you know, those guys I got a relationship with. I lived with the unit store man — “
HOST: “What’s a store man?”
WEINER: “The guy who has stuff that he sells. You can only go to to the commissary every so often, but if someone wants to go watch a movie and they want to get a bag of chips, the store man will take care you, and I lived with that guy and no one really f**ks with the store man. So there were ways that I stayed safe.”
HOST: “Being on a registry — like, if you kill someone, right, if I murder someone, I get out of jail, I don’t have to, like, tell my neighbors that I’m a murderer.”
WEINER: “Correct. Correct.”
HOST: “Like, what is it about — like, this category of crime, like, why is it treated differently?”
WEINER: “I don’t know. It’s kind of the last — I mean, it’s kind of weird. Obscenity is usually not considered one of these crimes, and so it’s kind of weird, but I guess sex crimes have their own special thing in people’s imagination because they’ve taken such a broad range of different things.”
HOST: “Is it all sex crimes or is it just involving minors?”
WEINER: “No, it’s all sex crimes.”
HOST: “All sex crimes?”
WEINER: “All sex crimes.”
HOST: “Yeah. Did you know that this individual was underage at the time?”
WEINER: “I don’t want to — I didn’t have a trial. I didn’t have a trial and I’m reluctant to do anything that sounds like I’m not accepting responsibility for what I did. However, there are elements of this case that made it winnable for me. Let’s just put it that way.”
HOST: “If it was winnable, why wouldn’t you try to win it?”
WEINER: “Because they said, ‘You can either except this charge. We’ll charge you with something else that has a mandatory minimum.’ And so the risk is called the trial penalty in the federal system, so it’s very risky and it’s why so few people go to trial, because you can plea bargain for 21 months and see your six-year-old again in a couple of years, or take your chance going to a trial with the name Anthony Weiner and all that goes with that, and hope that you win the case and spend a lot of money, and then you could then get charged with — then you’re found guilty of a 10-year mandatory minimum because they charge you with something else. Not many people go to trial in the federal system, like one or two percent, because they have the ability.”