The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple called George Stephanopoulos a “wounded talent” in the midst of a “snowballing” story that is “generating a world of trouble for ABC News and its chief anchor.”
On Fox News Thursday night, Megyn Kelly led The Kelly File with the story , calling it “a bombshell”–that Stephanopoulos had made donations to the Clinton Foundation without ever disclosing them to ABC or the public, even as he reported on Bill and Hillary Clinton.
“Stephanopoulos landed the first interview with (‘Clinton Cash’ author Peter Schweizer), and he gave him a grilling,” Kelly said, airing a series of tough questions from the interview. “What you did not hear in that interview is that as Stephanopoulos was grilling the author of ‘Clinton Cash,’ Stephanopoulos failed to disclose that he himself had donated $75,000 in Clinton cash of his own.”
Schweizer has suggested ABC owes him a do-over interview, telling Sean Hannity “going into that interview, I kind of assumed that the relationship with the Clintons was in the past, that he had made this transition into the media and it was a different chapter in his life.”
Fox’s Howard Kurtz said the Stephanopoulos story is serious, as it plays directly to his “Achilles heel”–his longtime ties to the Clintons. “This blunder by Stephanopoulos is so severe that it threatens to undo what he’s managed to accomplish in his eighteen years at ABC News.”