“This Week with George Stephanopoulos” opened Sunday with a scathing accusation of corruption by Donald Trump and his family – just six months after ABC agreed to a $16 million payment to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by the president for the anchor’s comments about E. Jean Carroll.
Stephanopoulos cracked the seal on “This Week” connecting the dots between Trump’s pardons and presidential fundraisers, suggesting Trump and his family were making millions through various pay-to-play schemes.
“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.”
George Stephanopoulos opened @ThisWeekABC in high-dungeon over presidential corruption: “This unprecedented money making by a sitting President and his family summarized by critics like @TheAtlantic’s David Frum: ‘Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the… pic.twitter.com/XAkW8xGyA7
— Brent Baker
(@BrentHBaker) June 1, 2025
Stephanopoulos also noted that the SEC had dropped a lawsuit against the cryptocurrency firm Binance, days after the company listed a currency from World Liberty Financial, which was started by Trump’s family. The anchor also cited a report in the Atlantic by David Frum.
“‘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.”
ABC News and Stephanopoulos agreed to a $16 million settlement with Donald Trump in December to resolve a defamation lawsuit stemming from a March 2024 interview in which the anchor incorrectly stated that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in the civil case brought by Carroll.
A New York jury had found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but not rape, due to the specific legal definitions under state law. The case had been progressing toward depositions for both Trump and Stephanopoulos before the agreement was reached, and was considered a significant legal victory for Trump.
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