It’s not Thursday yet, but this is quite the politically-relevant throwback.
Since ABC News chief anchor George Stephanoupolos was found to have gifted $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation without publicly disclosing the donations, a 2009 story in Politico has regained attention for alleging that the “This Week” host regularly engaged in conversation with Clinton insiders back in 2009.
Stephanopoulos himself, of course, is rather close to the Clintons, having served as communications director and senior advisor for policy and strategy during the Clinton Administration as well as fulfilling the role of communications director on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.
In the 2009 report, Stephanopoulos was said to have engaged in regular “round-robin chatter” with Democratic operative James Carville, political commentator and former Bill Clinton advisor Paul Begala, and now-Chicago Mayor and former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
From Politico:
The process happens not by design but as the byproduct of pre-dawn badinage — a smart-set take on the world that gets amplified by the prominent platforms all of them hold and by the dozens of later calls and lunches and rants that they will carry on with others throughout the day.
In that sense, the morning calls — no single one of which usually lasts more than a few minutes — among this gang of four is the headwaters of at least one major tributary of Washington politics.
The piece went on to allege that Stephopoulos, though a journalist, would not “surrender” his personal admiration for the Clintons on the calls.
“We are all good friends. We just like talking to each other, and I learn a lot from it … and that’s why we have been doing it for so long,” the ABC News anchor reportedly said of the conversations at the time.
ABC has insisted that the 2009 story “wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now,” according to the New York Post.
Nevertheless, the report is all the more illuminating now that Stephanopoulos is known to have given $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation for three consecutive years beginning in 2012.
ABC has since stood by its star journalist, forgiving him for what the network dubbed an “honest mistake.”
