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Former Clinton White House Communications Director George Stephanopoulos interrogated South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace on ABC last weekend over the lawmaker’s support of former President Donald Trump.
“You’ve endorsed Donald Trump for president,” Stephanopoulos began. “Judges in two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Trump with the testimony we just saw?”
Stephanopoulos pressed the question after he was former President Bill Clinton’s point man orchestrating smear campaigns against Clinton’s accusers of sexual misconduct throughout the ’90s. Stephanopoulos worked for Clinton on the former president’s 1992 campaign and later in the White House as communications chief until shortly after his re-election in 1996. During his tenure, Stephanopoulos led Clinton’s operation to discredit allegations of sexual harassment from Paula Jones, a former employee of Clinton’s from his time as governor who sued the president in 1994.
Former Fox News prime-time host Megyn Kelly traced Stephanopoulos’s history of discrediting Jones on a Monday podcast.
“Did you defend Paula Jones, saying, ‘We don’t shame accusers! That’s wrong!'” Kelly said. “No. You compared Jones to Tonya Harding as, quoting here from The New York Times, ‘just another woman seeking cash for telling a tabloid tale.'”
Fire up that war room, George, and destroy her. Bill Clinton would ultimately pay Paula Jones almost a million dollars to settle her civil suit against him, and you remained Team Clinton all the way. To say nothing of Juanita Brodderick’s rape allegation. Or Kathleen Willey’s allegations. And more.
Stephanopoulos also previously attended a party for child rapist Jeffrey Epstein following the billionaire’s 13-month prison sentence, and Stephanopoulos’s own network refused to air coverage of Epstein’s accusers.
In Sunday’s interview with Mace, Stephanopoulos repeatedly asked her how she could support a presidential candidate who had been “found liable for rape by a jury.” Washington Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York pointed out, “In fact, the jury specifically found Trump *not* liable for rape.”
“It found him liable for ‘sexual abuse,'” York noted on X. “The judge later tried to spin the decision, citing laws that did not apply, to argue that the jury ‘implicitly’ found Trump liable for rape.”
Trump, however, has been ordered by a federal judge in New York to promptly pay his 80-year-old accuser, E. Jean Carroll, more than $83 million in an unprecedented ruling against a former president.
“Stephanopoulos,” York added Monday, “in spite of the jury’s written finding, on 10 occasions said Trump had been found legally liable for rape. Why not just be accurate and say Trump was found liable for sexual abuse?”
York previously wrote in a January post the Carroll case against Trump “should never have been brought.”
The original incident occurred in 1995 or 1996; Carroll has said she does not remember precisely. She told two friends what she said happened, but never said another word to anyone, including authorities. Five years passed, then 10, then 15, then 20. Even in 2016, when a number of women accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct, Carroll stayed silent, in part because she worried that accusing Trump might help him politically, and she most certainly did not want to do that. … This case was political from the start. There is no way to know what did or did not happen in 1995 or 1996.