Clinton Foundation Took Donations From A Greek Millionaire

[Lord Jim]

ABC News’s Stephanopoulos donated $75,000 to Clinton Foundation

ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos made three contributions to the Clinton Foundation, ABC confirmed Thursday, in an apparent conflict with his duties as a journalist.

Stephanopoulos contributed $25,000 in 2012, 2013 and again last year to the charitable organization headed by former president Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea.

“PBS NewsHour” co-anchor Judy Woodruff also said that she had made a one-time donation to the charity — $250 in 2010.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a presidential candidate, said Thursday that Stephanopoulos’s donations should preclude him from moderating any debates during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Stephanopoulos, ABC’s chief political correspondent, was already regarded warily by Republicans because of his long association with the Clintons. He was a key adviser to Bill Clinton during his campaign in 1992 and served as a senior White House aide during Clinton’s first term. Republicans and media ethicists said the contributions raised questions about his objectivity and neutrality, particularly since he is likely to cover Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

ABC said that Stephanopoulos has decided not to moderate a Republican debate sponsored by the network and the Republican National Committee scheduled for Feb. 6. ABC News spokeswoman Heather Riley declined to say whether his decision was prompted by Paul’s criticism.

Stephanopoulos is the second major news anchor to run into ethical problems during the past three months. In February, NBC News suspended anchor Brian Williams for six months without pay for apparently exaggerating his reporting exploits over the years.

ABC said it has no plans to punish Stephanopoulos, issuing a statement saying that he had made “an honest mistake” and that the network was standing by him.

The network said Thursday morning that Stephanopoulos had made two annual contributions of $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation in 2013 and last year. But he subsequently checked his records and found that his donations began in 2012, the network said.

Stephanopoulos is co-host of “Good Morning America” and moderator of “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” the Sunday morning public-affairs program. The network said that he would address the contribution issue Friday on “Good Morning America.” He was not made available for an interview.

The charitable contributions, first disclosed by Politico after ABC received inquiries from the Washington Free Beacon, are potentially problematic because journalists are supposed to be independent of the people and organizations they cover.

“Being a journalist doesn’t mean you can’t be a citizen, or that you can’t vote or serve on the PTA. It does mean you can’t be on the PTA if you’re the education reporter,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, a research and training organization based in Arlington, Va. “If you have a conflict, people don’t know where your loyalties lie. . . . This should have been a clear, bright line for Stephanopoulos, because he came from the Clinton administration. He should be doubling over backward to demonstrate his independence.”

Stephanopoulos’s contributions to the Clinton charity were not disclosed last month when the ABC host interviewed Peter Schweizer, the author of “Clinton Cash,” a book about the Clintons and their foundation, on “This Week.”

During the interview, Stephanopoulos expressed skepticism about the book’s assertions that Hillary Clinton may have tied her actions as secretary of state to donations from foreign governments. Stephanopoulos said that ABC, other media outlets and independent investigators had not found “a smoking gun” tying her to any policy changes based on donations to the foundation.

In a statement issued Thursday morning by ABC, Stephanopoulos said: “I made charitable donations to the foundation in support of the work they’re doing on global AIDS prevention and deforestation, causes I care about deeply. I thought that my contributions were a matter of public record. However, in hindsight, I should have taken the extra step of personally disclosing my donations to my employer and to the viewers on air during the recent news stories about the foundation. I apologize.”

ABC News also issued a statement: “As George has said, he made charitable donations to the foundation to support a cause he cares about deeply and believed his contributions were a matter of public record. He should have taken the extra step to notify us and our viewers during the recent news reports about the foundation. He’s admitted to an honest mistake and apologized for that omission. We stand behind him.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle ... story.html

[rubato]

Lacking anything of substance they are giving the bottom of the barrel a good hard scraping (and hoping everyone will forget Stephanopoulos' actual history of objective reporting on the Clintons):


http://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/8607613/ge ... foundation

The fight over George Stephanopoulos giving $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation, explained

Updated by Andrew Prokop on May 14, 2015, 3:10 p.m. ET @awprokop andrew@vox.com

George Stephanopoulos. Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images


George Stephanopoulos of ABC donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation between 2012 and 2014, according to a report by Politico's Dylan Byers.
Stephanopoulos has covered Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and various controversies over the Clinton Foundation on air without disclosing those donations.
In a statement, Stephanopoulos said that the donations were for "global AIDS prevention and deforestation, causes I care about deeply," but apologized for not previously disclosing them. ABC News is also standing by Stephanopoulos, Byers says.
Stephanopoulos has a long and complicated history with the Clintons that includes working in the Clinton White House, but subsequently writing a tell-all book that infuriated the administration.

How Stephanopoulos went from a Democratic aide to a news anchor

George Stephanopoulos has an odd career track for a news anchor on a mainstream network — because he started his career in the world of Democratic politics. Working as an aide in the House of Representatives and on campaigns, he had a meteoric rise. He became Bill Clinton's first White House communications director at the age of 31.

But after Clinton's first term, Stephanopoulos left the White House, where he had fallen into disfavor (in part because the Clintons thought him a source of leaks to the media) and began to build a new career for himself, as a media commentator. He was soon hired by ABC News — and at first he was viewed as a reliably liberal, pro-Clinton voice.

""as far as Clinton was concerned, I was now a nonperson""

But after the Monica Lewinsky scandal arose, Stephanopoulos was notably reluctant to stick up for Clinton on the air. "I couldn't bring myself to say I believed him," Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir All Too Human. "I couldn't buy the party line." Eventually, he heard from old colleagues that "as far as Clinton was concerned, I was now a nonperson — my name was not to be mentioned in his presence." He continues: "I was the enemy now."

Indeed, his autobiography ends with a brutal line where Stephanopoulos wonders "what might have been — if only this good president had been a better man." That 1999 book, which reveals numerous behind-the-scenes interactions from the White House, only infuriated the Clintons further.

The controversy helped establish Stephanopoulos as a more nonpartisan voice. And when the network concluded that a lot of people really liked looking at and listening to him, he was elevated to higher and higher positions. He moved from a commentator to the host of ABC's Sunday morning show This Week in 2002, became a co-anchor of Good Morning America in 2009, and finally rose to chief anchor at ABC News in 2014.

Overall, Stephanopoulos has completed a transition from partisan politics to a high-level mainstream news job that hardly anyone else has managed. Bill Moyers is probably the closest comparison, but Stephanopoulos is viewed as less ideological, and his influence, through Good Morning America, has been more mainstream.

His donations to the Clinton Foundation, however, might imperil his hard-won reputation for fairness.
If Donald Trump can donate to the Clinton Foundation, why can't Stephanopoulos?

The argument in Stephanopoulos's defense here is that the Clinton Foundation is a charity, so donations to it shouldn't be interpreted as partisan. As Stephanopoulos said in his statement, his contributions related to "AIDS prevention and deforestation." Also, the argument goes, if conservatives like Donald Trump have donated money to the foundation, how could donations be interpreted as partisan?

On the disclosure question, anonymous sources told Byers that Stephanopoulos "gives to dozens of charities every year, and that the total sum of these annual contributions is in the millions of dollars." The implication is that these donations, being a small part of his overall giving, slipped through the cracks.

Still, mainstream reporters were, overall, quite disapproving when the news broke:

yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

Ask the Obama people how impartial George was when he moderated the debate between Barack and Hillary in '08...

[MajGenl.Meade]

Or when he interviewed that guy who wrote a book about the Clintones Foundation and the risk of .... no, surely not?

[Lord Jim]

Lacking anything of substance

That would be more or less the story of your life, would it not?

[Lord Jim]

Lacking anything of substance... blah, blah, blah, shill, shill, shill...

Rube likes to pretend, (as does Team Clinton) that all the concerns about the foundation funding, and speaker fees (and the decision to maintain a private server for emails contrary to government guidelines and administration policy, and then to destroy the emails that were under subpoena; a move that not even Nixon was willing to make) are exclusively some kind of right-wing hit job that nobody else cares about...

This is pure BS...

Prior to the publication of Clinton Cash the author took the book not only to FOX News, but also to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and ABC News for them to examine his research...

Subsequently, both The Times and The Post have launched their own investigations, and been publishing their findings, much to the consternation of Team Clinton...

It's pretty much impossible to argue that The New York Times and The Washington Post are part of the famous "vast right-wing conspiracy". And the latest poll number I saw on the question of whether or not Hillary is "trustworthy" had her all the way down to 26% saying yes....

That's a lot of "right wingers"....

The idea that the only ones who see a troubling pattern between CGI donations and State Department decisions (and Hillary's appointment as Secretary of State and Bill's suddenly having his speaking fees go up from $190,000 per appearance to $700,000) are hardcore Clinton haters is a complete fantasy that Team Clinton is trying hard to sell.

The reality is that just about the only ones who aren't troubled by this are her most hardcore supporters.

I wonder how rube would feel about if we had the exact same set of facts, but instead of being Hillary and Bill Clinton, it was Dick and Lynn Chaney....