Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (32 page)

“Tonight Me and Rachel on MSNBC. #The PerfectFridayDate UhKindaSorta”

Anthony Weiner’s postmodern public disclosures of his semiprivate life on the afternoon and evening of Friday, May 27, 2011, were interrupted briefly by his appearance at 30 Rock in midtown Manhattan for Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show. There he criticized Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for only just now offering financial details of his wife’s involvement in opposing Obama’s health care legislation—which, he argued, should compel Thomas to recuse himself from any cases on the subject. Weiner concluded his five-minute segment by laughing about Maddow’s segues and saying, “These Friday night visits are turning out to be very interesting to me.”

Later that evening he tweeted a baleful
“My tivo ate the hockey game! #WhoCanISue?”
—personifying the banal agony of a home-alone-on-Memorial-Day-weekend jock-sniffing sofa spud to his forty-three thousand followers. But to one twenty-one-year-old female follower in Washington state, he shared a different sort of message.

On Saturday afternoon, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a photograph of a man’s genitals encased in gray briefs, claiming that it had been sent from Weiner’s Twitter account. Though Weiner immediately told
Politico
that his account had been hacked, he didn’t sound particularly concerned or outraged. Breitbart, in the meantime, declared, “I have much more.”

Weiner’s former chief of staff, Marie Ternes, now an outside advisor, implored the congressman to set up a conference call with his kitchen cabinet, which included consultants Tom Freedman and Jim Margolis and pollster Joel Benenson.

“I don’t see why that’s necessary,” Weiner said.

“Then let’s go through what we know,” Ternes persisted. “Let’s go through the facts so that we can push back on what’s being said to prove our case.”

When Weiner continued to be evasive, Ternes suggested that he bring the Capitol police into the situation.

“Well,
you
didn’t,” Weiner responded, referring to Ternes’s personal email account having previously been hacked into.

“I’m a civilian, not an elected official,” his former chief of staff retorted. But Weiner ignored all of her advice. Blithely he endeavored to return to the life of the legislator who just the previous Monday had passed a bill to establish a memorial in Arlington National Cemetery honoring the thirteen Jewish chaplains who had lost their lives in armed conflict; whose
www.ConflictedClarenceThomas.com
project had established himself as the Supreme Court justice’s chief tormentor in Congress; whose rapier counterthrusts against the Republican agenda had made him a liberal darling; who, up until this very moment, remained the prohibitive front-runner to replace Bloomberg as Hizzoner of New York City.

Huma believed that her husband’s account had been hacked. In that Clintonesque manner of plowing one’s way through crisis, she told Weiner that he should proceed with plans to speak at the Wisconsin State Democratic Convention on Friday, June 3. But as the date approached and Weiner’s responses to media questions became increasingly hedged with qualifiers, Margolis and other advisors persuaded him to cancel.

“My wife saw that photo and said, ‘Yeah, you
wish
!’ ” he snickered to colleagues on Wednesday, June 1, the day he acknowledged to MSNBC’s Luke Russert a lack of “certitude” as to whether the photo was of her husband’s genitals. That same day, Weiner Tweeted,
“Ok, howz about I get back in the game over here. #ScrappyHasBlownPastCrazy.”

A friendly colleague confronted him. “Anthony,” the colleague said,
“I don’t think you were hacked. I think there’s more to this. You need to tell me what’s going on here.”

“Nothing, nothing,” Weiner insisted. “The execution of my explanation leaves a little to be desired, and I’m gonna clean it up by the end of the day.”

But later that week, as new photos and new women began to come forward, Anthony Weiner did something that he had never done before. On the House floor, he sat down on the far left side of the chamber, among the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and engaged in prolonged, lighthearted chatter with them.

As one of the CBC members would later say, “We knew it right then, when he came to the group that is seen as the most forgiving and compassionate—we knew then he was guilty of what was being reported.”

He confessed to his wife at their home in Queens on the morning of Monday the sixth of June. He then began calling and emailing others. Nancy Pelosi was one of them. She was furious and instructed him to come completely clean.

When he told the truth to his former boss and mentor, Senator Chuck Schumer, both men began to cry.

At about one that afternoon, Weiner and several of his associates met in the midtown Manhattan office of his longtime counsel, John Siegal. Huma was there as well. She seemed extraordinarily composed and had brought her husband a suit to wear to his press conference. Weiner had decided to take any and all questions—and his staff, exhausted and largely in the dark as to what the facts actually were, figured there was no alternative.

For the next few hours, his advisors—Siegal, Benenson, Margolis, Freedman, Ternes, Anson Kaye, Glen Caplin, Jeff Pollack, and Risa Heller—fired likely questions at the embattled congressman. Sometimes his answers contained truths they had not known. Sometimes the answers were untrue, but they had no way of knowing this, either. More than once, Weiner broke down in tears.

At 4:25
P.M.
, Weiner walked into the
ballroom of the Sheraton hotel
, making eye contact with no one. No one had bothered to check press
credentials. The immense throng included his chief accuser Breitbart, as well as crew members from shock-jock Howard Stern’s radio program.

“Thank you very much for being here and good afternoon,” Weiner began in a voice that was both formal and strained. “I’d like to take this time to clear up some of the questions that have been raised over the past ten days or so, and take full responsibility for my actions.

“At the outset, I’d like to make it clear that I’ve made terrible mistakes that have hurt the people that I care about the most, and I’m deeply sorry. I have not been honest with myself, my family, my constituents, my friends, and supporters and the media. Last Friday night I tweeted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as part of a direct message as a joke to a woman in Seattle . . . In addition, in the past few years I’ve engaged in several inappropriate conversations that were conducted on Twitter, Facebook, email, and occasionally over the phone with women I have met online. I’ve exchanged messages and photos of an explicit nature with about six women over the last three years. For the most part, these communications took place before my marriage, though some sadly took place after . . .”

Swallowing back tears, the congressman’s statement concluded with “I’d be glad to take any questions that you might have.”

He responded to the cacophony in a weak voice, moist-eyed, without any of the usual flashes of petulance or bemusement:

“I am not resigning . . .”

“I don’t know why I did it . . .”

“My home computer is where I usually did these things . . . I don’t believe I used any government resources . . .”

“I was trying to protect myself from shame . . .”

“We have no intention of splitting up over this . . .”

After twenty-seven minutes, Risa Heller handed him a slip of paper urging him to wrap things up. As the Howard Stern associate hollered repeatedly, “Were you fully erect?” Weiner left the podium.

Weiner and his advisors agreed that it had gone as well as could be expected. They discussed putting some town halls and Congress on Your Corner events on the schedule.

Two days later, however, Weiner remained in his home, which was surrounded by reporters. A photograph, supposedly of the congressman’s erect penis, was now on the Internet. Pennsylvania Congresswoman
Allyson Schwartz, the DCCC’s recruiting director, became his first colleague to call publicly for Weiner’s resignation.

“Do you think I should resign?” he asked an associate that day.

The associate responded that Weiner had broken no laws and had done nothing that would prevent his continuing to be an effective representative to his constituents. It was the affirmation Weiner wanted to hear.

On Friday, June 10, it developed that one of Weiner’s contacts had been a female minor in Delaware. The police rushed to her parents’ home to gather information. White House political director Patrick Gaspard told Weiner’s advisors, “We were willing to stand by him before, but I don’t see how we can do it any longer.”

“Guys, I don’t know what to do,” Weiner told his inner circle on Saturday. “I just can’t figure out what I should do.”

Earlier that day, Leader Pelosi, DCCC chairman Israel, and Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz had each released statements calling on Weiner to resign. Now he sounded almost lifeless. His wife was traveling overseas; Weiner wanted to forestall any decision until he could speak to her in person. Huma had gone out on a limb by marrying a Jew, which was not an easy pill to swallow for her conservative Muslim mother living in London. By now word had leaked out that Huma was pregnant. It was no doubt her preference that their child not be burdened by the stigma of a father who had resigned in disgrace from political office.

He left that day for inpatient therapy somewhere out of state, going to great lengths to conceal his trail and his future whereabouts. Huma flew back to the States and met him at the clinic on Wednesday the fifteenth. That evening, he called Steve Israel, who was at the White House attending the annual congressional picnic. Israel handed the phone to Nancy Pelosi. Weiner told her what he had just finished telling Israel: he was resigning the next day.

He did so, at a perfunctory news conference where he took no questions. Complimented by a friend for his composure, he emailed back: “Thanks. Dropping out of things is what I do.”

Then he and his wife retreated to his brother’s place on Long Island for the weekend.

On Sunday, June 19, Anthony Weiner returned to Washington.
He submitted a two-sentence letter of resignation the next day to Speaker Boehner, Leader Pelosi, and New York’s governor and secretary of state. Then the clown prince of Capitol Hill somehow entered his office in the Rayburn Building without being detected, cleaned out his desk, and disappeared from Congress for good.

His name did not come up in the next Democratic caucus. His colleagues did not offer public expressions of mourning. Instead, they returned to their mantra of jobs/Medicare/oil subsidies, which for the previous three weeks had been drowned out by scandal. The media scrum disappeared from outside Rayburn 2104—and inside, the same staffers as before now simply answered the phone, “Ninth Congressional District of New York,” as if to expunge all memory of the forty-six-year-old man who had spent the last eleven and a half years as that district’s representative.

It was as if a brutally efficient celestial correction had taken place. A master of multimedia had been undone, caught in the act of high-tech overindulgence. An employer who had shown so little consideration for others had become fatally ensnared in the sort of Internet dalliances that were attractive precisely because they required no emotional interaction. The ultimate independent agent had been severed from the congressional corpus without a drop of blood to show for it. Having never demonstrated much in the way of fidelity to the other 434, Anthony Weiner in the end became, for all his flair and promise, a mortally wounded liability that was culled from the herd and consigned to the political wilderness.

And indeed a couple of months later, he was just another guy at a Brooklyn barbecue, listening to his wife tell the others how she had not been displaying the usual signs of pregnancy—no morning sickness, no hunger pangs.

“Yeah,” Weiner could not resist interjecting. “But she’s been
really angry
at her husband the last two months.”

Everyone laughed. That, too, was part of the correction.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“You Are
Wrong
!”

On June 1, 2011
, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy threw a dinner for the House Republican women at Ruth’s Chris Steak House. The event was primarily for the benefit of the nine GOP female freshmen—and for McCarthy, who hoped to cultivate a reliable voting bloc. It began with a cocktail reception featuring a handful of prominent Republican women—among them former Bush White House press secretary Dana Perino, former Senator Elizabeth Dole, and former labor secretaries Ann McLaughlin Korologos and Elaine Chao—so as to welcome the new arrivals into the larger Washington sorority. McCarthy was well aware that the presence of women in the GOP conference (24 of 240, as opposed to 48 of 194 in the Democratic caucus) could stand improvement. He also knew that the class of 2010 contained a fairly high-testosterone component. Tonight the women would only have to suffer the company of McCarthy and his wingman, chief deputy whip Peter Roskam.

Jo Ann Emerson was among the dozen or so senior members in attendance. It was generally her inclination to avoid the whole Republican-women-solidarity thing. In early April, when GOP conference vice chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Mary Bono Mack were rounding up women to stage a press conference rebutting Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s claim that the Republicans were pushing
“an extreme anti-woman agenda,”
the Missouri congresswoman begged off. She was also a no-show in June, when McMorris Rodgers floor-managed a “special order” during which a succession of her female colleagues each contributed a few minutes’ worth of personal history so as to, in the vice chairwoman’s words, “tell you the story of the Republican woman.” Emerson also did not appear
in the NRCC’s “Republican Women” Web montages aimed at recruiting more female candidates for the GOP cause.

There was no confusion at work here: she was a proud Republican and a proud woman. Nor was she, by nature, antisocial. It was Emerson and another colleague who conceived and organized the annual Congressional Women’s Softball Game, despite the fact that she was not the world’s best athlete. But the concept of that event was—in keeping with Jo Ann Emerson’s governing philosophy—nonpartisan. Her co-organizer happened to be Wasserman Schultz. The two had bonded in 2009, while enduring a ten-day CODEL in Southeast Asia, during which they both marveled at how consistently perfect Guam Representative Madeleine Bordallo looked throughout the trip while everyone else looked like crap. The House men’s softball game was approaching, and when Wasserman Schultz mentioned that she had been a fairly scrappy ballplayer in high school, the two women hatched the idea of an alternative game. So it came to pass in 2009, and in the years that followed, that Republican and Democrat women played on the same team against a team of women from the Washington media. The game was highly competitive and great fun, raising a nice purse of money for the Young Survival Coalition, a nonprofit breast cancer organization, along the way, and thereafter it became understood that the DNC chairwoman would never launch an attack against any of her Republican teammates.