The fallout from the revelation that ABC's George Stephanopoulos -- the co-anchor of Good Morning America and host of the Sunday morning This Week program -- donated $75,000 to the foundation run by Hillary Clinton and her family intensified on May 17, when two of his former co-workers hammered him while they were guests on CNN's Reliable Sources show.
The strongest criticism came from Carol Simpson, who indicated that after Stephanopoulos was the communications director for Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, he served as White House communication director until 1996:
There is a coziness that George cannot escape.
While he did try to separate himself from his political background to become a journalist, he really isn’t a journalist.
Simpson, who anchored the weekend edition of World News Tonight from 1988 to 2003 before leaving ABC News in 2006 to teach journalism at Emerson College in Boston, challenged Stephanopoulos’s claims of impartiality as the 2016 presidential campaign gets underway, including Hillary Clinton’s status as the front runner for the Democratic nomination.
Like Reliable Sources host Brian Smelter and another former ABC News colleague -- Jeff Greenfield -- Simpson said she was “dumbfounded” by the fact that Stephanopoulos failed to disclose his donations even though he conducted a confrontational April 26 interview with Clinton Foundation critic and author of the Clinton Cash book, Peter Schweizer.
Referring to Stephanopoulos, Simpson noted: “I wanted to just take him by the neck and say, ‘George, what were you thinking?’ Clearly, he was not thinking. I thought it was outrageous. And I am sorry that again the public trust in the media is being challenged and frayed because of the actions of some of the top people in the business.”
Simpson added that despite the host's lack of journalistic experience, “ABC has made him the face of ABC News, the chief anchor, and I think they’re really caught in a quandary here.”
“While ABC says this was ‘an honest mistake,’ they don’t feel that way,” she asserted. “Secretly, they are hopping mad, I am sure.”
Despite ABC's official statement of support asserting that the people in the news division “stand behind” Stephanopoulos and he won’t face suspension or other disciplinary action, “George may be in some hot water within ABC,” Simpson said.
Greenfield, another person who moved into journalism from politics after serving as a speechwriter for senator Robert F. Kennedy, also came out swinging.
He speculated that Stephanopoulos might have donated to the Clinton Foundation to repair a frayed relationship with his former employers -- who felt betrayed by his best-selling White House memoir, All Too Human, and by his early prediction on ABC that the Monica Lewinsky scandal could lead to impeachment.
Greenfield added that ABC News might be forced into the decision that Stephanopoulos must recuse himself from covering the 2016 campaign at all.
The ABC News anchor's self-made mess, Greenfield said, is “an indication that very smart people are sometimes very foolish.”
However, facing a rising chorus of criticism for his lapse in judgment, Stephanopoulos dug in his heels and on Sunday repeated word-for-word the same apology as he did on Friday’s edition of Good Morning America, where he is the co-host with Robin Roberts.
Also commenting on the Clinton controversy was Sean Hannity, host of his own weeknight program on the Fox News Channel, who declared: “Once a Clinton liberal hack, always a Clinton liberal hack.”
In addition, John Nolte, editor-at-large at the Breitbart.com website, asked: “When it comes to the Clintons and money, the question is always the same: What’s the quid pro quo?”
He then asserted:
The idea that George Stephanopoulos, the face of ABC News, donated $75,000 and much of his time to the Clinton Foundation for altruistic reasons is, of course, preposterous.
While Stephanopoulos probably does care about the causes he laid out in his dual apologies on Friday’s Good Morning America and Sunday’s This Week, only a fool would believe the Clinton Foundation was the best way to serve those causes.
“George Stephanopoulos is many things, but he is no fool,” Nolte stated.
“Other than effectively pushing a left-wing, big government agenda, the currency of the D.C. media elite is information and scoops,” he continued.
“That all comes from access,” Nolte added, “and what better way for Stephanopoulos to slither back into the good graces of a likely future president than by doing so through the slush fund of her Foundation?”
The ABC anchor “has always been tainted; now he is exposed,” Nolte concluded.
The dispute is unlikely to go away anytime soon, especially since Schweizer has challenged Stephanopolous to “do another interview on the Sunday morning show so we actually get a chance for viewers to hear what is in the book.”
