George Stephanopoulos, the former adviser to President Bill Clinton and now anchor of ABC‘s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, opened Sunday’s program with a pointed accusation: that Donald Trump and his family are engaged in large-scale corruption.
The segment aired just six months after ABC News agreed to a $16 million settlement in a defamation case brought by Trump over comments Stephanopoulos made about E. Jean Carroll.
Stephanopoulos launched into the broadcast by drawing connections between Trump-era presidential pardons and high-dollar political fundraisers, implying a systematic pay-to-play scheme enriching the former president and his inner circle.
“The scale is staggering,” Stephanopoulos said. “Donald Trump and his family are making hundreds of millions, potentially billions of dollars, as Trump and his administration are taking official actions that benefit contributors and investors.
“Just this week, we learned of pardons to tax cheats, including a man whose mother was pardoned just weeks after she attended a million-dollar-a-head fundraiser for the president, the Trump media and technology group, raising $2.5 billion dollars from 50 institutional investors whose identities have not been disclosed.”
He also spotlighted the recent decision by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to drop a lawsuit against cryptocurrency giant Binance, days after the platform listed a digital currency launched by World Liberty Financial—an entity started by Trump’s family.
Citing a piece by David Frum in The Atlantic, Stephanopoulos underscored the unprecedented nature of the alleged corruption.
“‘Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency,’ he writes,” Stephanopoulos said.
“‘Throw away the history books, discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past … The brazenness resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a post-colonial African dictatorship.’ That’s where we begin this week.”
The timing of Stephanopoulos’ attack is notable, given ABC‘s multimillion-dollar settlement with Trump in December 2024. That lawsuit stemmed from a March interview in which the anchor incorrectly claimed Trump had been found “liable for rape” in the civil case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.
In fact, a New York jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation—but not rape—due to the specific legal definitions under state law. The case had been nearing depositions for both Trump and Stephanopoulos before the network reached a deal, widely viewed as a legal win for the former president.
