Watch Anthony Weiner Discover He's Not Going To Be New York's Mayor

There was about as much pain and anguish as you could imagine.
Anthony Weiner was always going to face a tough climb to end up mayor. He made it even tougher on himself.
Anthony Weiner was always going to face a tough climb to end up mayor. He made it even tougher on himself.
Lucas Jackson / Reuters

In an interview a few months back, former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) explained exactly what was going through his head as his career hit a new nadir.

The setting was a press conference in the midst of his 2013 mayoral campaign, and the news had broken that Weiner was sexting with Internet liaisons after he had already been forced to resign from Congress due to a similar scandal. Now in the bright spotlight of the New York media universe, he hastily arranged a press conference to address the new revelations. His wife Huma Abedin stood awkwardly by his side.

"I had had this ethos about this, that one thing I could not do anymore is be dishonest about this stuff," Weiner told the Huffington Post's Candidate Confessional podcast. "What I did not realize fully at that moment was that the way I had spoken about this up till then, that most stuff was going to come out, was not satisfactory to the people I had spoken to."

Talking about that press conference in the interview, Weiner seemed sullen but not overly pained. He was, by then, far removed from the anguish.

But in “Weiner,” a new documentary chronicling his failed 2013 New York City mayoral bid, viewers get a sense of how raw and panicked that moment, and those leading up to it, actually were. In the clip below, provided exclusively to The Huffington Post, Weiner sits in the back of a car with a campaign aide going over potential questions that he's bound to face after the latest scandal has emerged.

The wheels turning inside Weiner's head are obvious as he tries to remember the past (unsatisfactory) answers he's given to these questions.

Watching it, you get a sense of how incredibly tempting it is for politicians to try to dodge, to find a cleverly worded way out that keeps their political hopes intact. But Weiner ultimately settles on telling the truth. In turn, he begins to realize that his campaign is about to morph into a discomforting carnival, and that instead of ending up the Democratic nominee for mayor, he'll now be running for some form of political and/or moral redemption.

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