George Stephanopoulos came out swinging against President Donald Trump and his family during the opening remarks of his This Week broadcast on Sunday.
Stephanopoulos alleged that the Trump clan has exploited the highest office in the land to generate “billions of dollars” in deals.
“The scale is staggering,” the ABC host said. “President Trump and his family are making hundreds of millions, potentially billions of dollars as Trump and his administration take official actions that benefit contributors and investors.”
ABC had to issue an apology to Trump as part of a $16 million settlement with the Republican president late last year after Stephanopoulos falsely stated that Trump had been “found liable for rape.” However, Trump, in fact, had been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in the trial involving author E. Jean Carroll.
Still, that didn’t stop Stephanopoulos from taking Trump and his White House administration to task in a flurry of rebukes directed at his policies, including a to pardon convicted tax cheat Paul Walzcak before he even reported to prison. The pardon came after his mother attended a $1 million-dollar-a-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
The Securities and Exchange Commission also dropped its long-running lawsuit against crypto-trading platform Binance over 13 violations of federal securities laws, but not before the trading group had listed a cryptocurrency launched by the Trump family crypto-firm, World Liberty Financial.
That move followed after Trump’s social media company, Trump Media Technology Group, announced it would raise around $2.5 billion to invest in Bitcoin. So far, none of the estimated 50 institutional investors in the group have been publicly identified.
Stephanopoulos said on Sunday “this unprecedented money making by a sitting president and his family” had perhaps been best characterized by journalist David A. Graham for The Atlantic.
Quoting from the article, Stephanopoulos said,“‘Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books; discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past.”
He added, “‘There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic of a postcolonial African dictatorship.’”
