Disgraced U.S. ex-congressman Anthony Weiner, was sentenced in a New York Court on Monday to 21 months in jail for exchanging sexually explicit text messages with a 15-year-old girl.
The sentence for transferring obscene material to a minor in 2016 follows a May 19 guilty plea by the former congressman and one-time New York mayoral candidate.
“This is a serious crime that deserves serious punishment,’’ Judge Denise Cote said.
The scandal might have had an indirect, but decisive, role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as it was the FBI investigation into Weiner which uncovered Clinton campaign emails forwarded to him from his then-wife Huma Abedin, a top aide in Hillary Clinton’s team.
Abedin has since filed for divorce from Weiner.
The discovery of the emails led to the then-FBI chief James Comey, reopening the investigation into Clinton’s emails days before Americans went to the polls to vote.
Weiner, a former congressman from New York City, has found himself repeatedly in hot water over sexting.
In 2011 he mistakenly sent a photo of his crotch, wearing only underpants, to all his Twitter followers, instead of just the young woman with whom he was flirting over the internet.
Weiner resigned from Congress after that episode.
He tried to restart his political career two years later by entering the race for mayor of New York but squandered his bid after revelations that he had continued to sext even after publicly apologising for other illicit transgressions.