NYT: Weiner To Plead Guilty To Sending Obscene Material To A Minor

Anthony Weiner is expected to plead guilty Friday to a federal charge of transferring obscene material to a minor, the New York Times reported.

The Times cited two unnamed people who had been briefed on the matter.

The charge stemmed from Weiner’s explicit text messaging in January 2016 with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, the Times reported. The paper noted the plea will cover his conduct from January through March of last year.

The British tabloid Daily Mail first reported the explicit texts in September 2016. Other sexting scandals, though not with underage women, led to Weiner’s resignation from Congress in 2011, and then derailed his New York City mayoral campaign in 2013.

Weiner’s sexts also had a profound effect on the 2016 presidential race.

Eleven days before the election, then-FBI Director James Comey notified congressional leaders that he was revisiting the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, breaking longstanding Justice Department policy.

“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote.

The “unrelated case” turned out to be the FBI’s investigation into Weiner’s sexting with the 15-year-old girl. The bureau had found emails originating from Clinton’s private server on Weiner’s laptop, which Huma Abedin, Weiner’s estranged partner and a top Clinton aide, had also used.

Two days before the election, Comey announced that the newly discovered emails did not in fact change the FBI’s previous decision not to recommend charges against Clinton.

This post has been updated.