(JTA) — In leaked correspondence from 2011, Hillary Clinton associates discussed flippantly their concern for her top aide Huma Abedin over her cohabitation with disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, her husband.
The correspondence, released by the WikiLeaks website, took place on June 10 of that year, four days after Weiner admitted that he had sent inappropriate photos of himself to women on the internet and then lied about it, claiming that someone had hacked his online accounts, the New York Post reported Thursday.
“Time to get in the haz mat suits,” Jennifer Palmieri, who is now the Clinton campaign’s communications director, wrote to John Podesta, the chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and to Clinton associate Neera Tanden about Abedin. “Bust in that house and get Huma the hell out of there.”
Hazmat is an abbreviation for “hazardous materials.”
Tanden, who worked for Clinton when she was a U.S. senator, replied: “Lord have mercy.”
Two days later, top Democrats in the House of Representatives, including then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, called for Weiner’s resignation. Weiner relented and announced on June 16, 2011, that he would relinquish his post.
Weiner, who is Jewish, and Abedin, a Muslim, wed in July 2010, with former President Bill Clinton officiating. The two are featured in the recent documentary “Weiner,” about his aborted 2013 campaign for mayor of New York City.
In August, Abedin said she and Weiner were separating after the Post published exchanges between Weiner and an unnamed woman that included sexually suggestive messages and photos. The two were said to have been corresponding from January 2015 to August of this year.
One photograph, reportedly sent in July 2015, shows Weiner from the waist down wearing only a pair of boxers. Next to him is a sleeping child identified by the Post and others as his son, then 3.
Last month, The New York Times reported that a renewed investigation into whether Clinton or her aides mishandled classified information arose out of the FBI probe of whether Weiner sexted with an underage girl.
FBI Director James Comey sent a letter last week to Capitol Hill to announce that new evidence had emerged in the Clinton email investigation. That evidence was on Weiner’s laptop, which he apparently shared with Abedin. The FBI received that device in an investigation that began years later looking into Weiner’s alleged sexting with a 15-year-old girl.
This week, the British Daily Mail newspaper reported that Weiner had checked into an inpatient addiction treatment facility to deal with his addiction to cybersex and exhibitionism.
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