Morning Jill: Top Hillary Clinton Aide Huma Abedin Joins MSNBC as Contributor

Top Hillary Clinton aide and longtime advisor Huma Abedin has joined MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” team as a contributor. She will also serve as vice chair of anchor Mika Brzezinski’s Know Your Value International Women’s Day Summit in Abu Dhabi in March. 

“I can’t tell you how excited I am” to be part of the summit,” said Abedin, who played an important role at the last ’30’50’ summit “that gathered generations of women from both the Forbes’ ’30 Under 30’ list and ’50 Over 50.’ She was a speaker and moderator and presented Hillary Clinton with the International Women’s Day Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Abedin also talked about her memoir “Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds,” which 

released in paperback last week. Published in 2021, “Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds” explores the power of family, friendship, and commitment as well as “the feelings of love, loss, betrayal, trauma, re-birth. Born in the United States to a father raised in India and a mother from Pakistan, she spent much of her childhood in Saudi Arabia. 

The estranged wife of former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) has spent her entire career in public service and national politics, beginning as an intern in First Lady Hillary Clinton’s office in 1996. After four years in the White House, she worked in the U.S. Senate as Senior Advisor to Senator Clinton and was traveling Chief of Staff for Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. In 2009, she was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff at the \Department of State. Abedin served as vice chair of Hillary for America in 2016, which led to the first woman elected nominee of a major political party.

She made headlines in 2011 after Weiner was accused of sending sexual messages and photos to various women. She “initially stood by Weiner’s side,” Us magazine reported at the time, but she later announced their separation after he admitted to sexting with a 15-year-old girl. “After long and painful consideration and work on my marriage, I have made the decision to separate from my husband,” she told Us in a statement in August 2016. The couple share a son together.

Almost five years after Weiner’s sexting scandal broke out, Abedin and Weiner are in the final stages of the divorce. This February, Weiner told the New York Post that their divorce is “all but finalized, and is on paper. “Now we just have to wait for the court system to catch up with us.”

Abedin first filed for divorce in 2017, though later withdrew the case so their lawyers could negotiate out of the public eye, as the couple continued to live in the same East Village building. The COVID-19 pandemic further delayed the legal separation.

She was again in the news this summer over reports that she was in a relationship with Bradley Cooper. The two were introduced by Vogue editor Anna Wintour, “who is close with both of them,” Page Six reported. According to the report, “the high-profile pair arrived together at the Met Gala on May 2 and then split up for the red carpet.” Abedin, 46, wore a canary-yellow gown. The New York Post also reported that in June, Abedin put her East Hampton pad up for rent at $35,000 per month. 

The news came a few weeks after Abedin confessed to “gradually moving on.” She was speaking to The Guardia on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literary Festival in Soneva Fushi in the Maldives, in May. She told the British paper that she finds dating apps intimidating. “I’m trying to stay open, but dating is terrifying, which also makes it exciting,” she said. “ I believe in love – I had it, I know what it felt like, I’d love to have that feeling again.”

Last week, she told WSJ Magazine that she had put “dating in the category of one of the things I did not allow myself to be open to for many years, particularly when I was living in New York in the early 2000s, when Hillary [Clinton] was in the Senate and it was a very glamorous time in New York.”