George Stephanopoulos, a former top operative in the Bill Clinton White House, a man who donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation, will interview Hillary Clinton on Sunday’s This Week.
With no sense of a conflict of interest, ABC’s Amy Robach proudly broke the news on Friday’s Good Morning America: “George will be interviewing Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush live on This Week, this Sunday right here on ABC.”
On May 14, it was revealed that Stephanopoulos, without telling his bosses at ABC or his viewers, made secret donations to the Clinton Foundation. As a result, Politico noted the GMA co-host would not be moderating an ABC-sponsored Republican debate.
On May 15, Stephanopoulos offered a self-aggrandizing apology:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Now, I want to address some news you may have seen about me. Over the last several years, I have made substantial donations to dozens of charities, including the Clinton Global Foundation. Those donations were a matter of public record. But I should have made additional disclosures on-air when we covered the foundation and I now believe directing personal donations to that foundation was a mistake. Even though I made them strictly to support work done to stop the spread of AIDS, help children and protect the environment in poor countries, I should have gone the extra mile to avoid even the appearance of a conflict. I apologize to all of you for failing to do that.
This was not Stephanopoulos’s first conflict of interest. In 2009, it was revealed that he appeared on Democratic conference calls with Paul Begala and James Carville.
