George Stephanopoulos

George Stephanopoulos was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, the son of Robert George Stephanopoulos and Nickolitsa "Nikki" Gloria (née Chafos). His parents were of Greek descent. His father was a Greek Orthodox priest and dean emeritus of the Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in New York City. His mother was the director of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America National News Service for many years. His sister is Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos.

Following some time in Purchase, New York, Stephanopoulos moved to the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, where he graduated in 1978 from Orange High School in Pepper Pike.

In 1982, Stephanopoulos received a Bachelor of Arts degree (summa cum laude) with a major in political science from Columbia University in New York, and was the salutatorian of his class. While at Columbia, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his junior year and was awarded a Harry S. Truman Scholarship. He was also a sports broadcaster for 89.9 WKCR-FM, the university's radio station. As a student, he lived in Carman Hall and East Campus.

Stephanopoulos attended Balliol College at the University of Oxford in England, as a Rhodes Scholar, earning a Master of Arts in Theology in 1984.

Early work

Stephanopoulos worked in Washington, D.C. as an aide to Ed Feighan of Ohio, a Democratic congressman. His job included drafting letters, memos, and speeches. His salary was reportedly $14,500 a year. He later became Feighan's chief of staff.

In 1988, Stephanopoulos worked on the U.S. presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis. He noted that one of his attractions to the campaign was that Dukakis was a Greek-American liberal from Massachusetts. After the campaign, Stephanopoulos became an executive floor assistant to Dick Gephardt, U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader; he held this position until he joined the Clinton campaign.

Other ventures

George Stephanopoulos is the co-founder of production companies BedBy8 and George Stephanopoulos Productions. These companies produced Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK, Power Trip: Those Who Seek Power and Those Who Chase Them, and Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier.

Stephanopoulos is a Greek Orthodox Christian and has earned a master's degree in theology.

In 2001, Stephanopoulos married actress, comedian, and writer, Ali Wentworth, at the Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity on New York's Upper East Side. They have two daughters, one born in 2002 and one born in 2005. Stephanopoulos was introduced to transcendental meditation by Jerry Seinfeld. Conducting an interview on Good Morning America, he said, "We're all here because we all have something in common—we all practice Transcendental Meditation. … I think that people don't really understand exactly what it is and what a difference it has made in people's lives."

Clinton Foundation charity donations

Stephanopoulos donated $25,000 in 2012, 2013, and 2014, a total of $75,000, to the Clinton Foundation, but did not disclose the donations to ABC News, his employer, or to his viewers. Stephanopoulos failed to reveal the donations even on April 26, 2015, while interviewing Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, a book which alleges that donations to the Foundation influenced some of Hillary Clinton's actions as Secretary of State. After exposure of the donations by Politico on May 14, 2015, Stephanopoulos apologized and admitted he should have disclosed the donations to ABC News and its viewers. The story was broken by The Washington Free Beacon, which had questioned ABC News regarding the matter. The donations had been reported by the Clinton Foundation, which Stephanopoulos had considered sufficient, a reliance ABC News characterized as "an honest mistake".

Based on Stephanopoulos's donations to The Clinton Foundation charity and his behavior during prior interviews and presidential debates, Republican party leaders and candidates expressed their distrust, and called for him to be banned from moderating 2016 Presidential debates, due to bias and conflict of interest. He agreed to drop out as a moderator of the scheduled February 2016 Republican presidential primary debate.

In the month prior to the revelation of his donations, Stephanopoulos told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show that when money is given to the Clinton Foundation, "everybody" knows there's "a hope that that's going to lead to something, and that's what you have to be careful of."

Clinton administration

Stephanopoulos was, with David Wilhelm and James Carville, a leading member of Clinton's 1992 U.S. presidential campaign. His role on the campaign is portrayed in the documentary film The War Room (1993).

In the Clinton administration, Stephanopoulos served as a senior advisor for policy and strategy. His initiatives focused on crime legislation, affirmative action, and health care. His salary was reportedly $125,000 per year. At the outset of Clinton's presidency, Stephanopoulos also served as the de facto press secretary, briefing the press even though Dee Dee Myers was officially the White House Press Secretary. Stephanopoulos was regarded as a member of Bill Clinton's inner circle.

In 1994, after Paula Jones accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment, Stephanopoulos and James Carville sought to discredit her allegations against Clinton. Both men suggested that Jones was just seeking cash for her story. Stephanopoulos also successfully sought to keep Jones's news conference off television. Stephanopoulos called NBC journalist Tim Russert, CNN chairman Tom Johnson, as well as several others, whom he convinced to keep her conference off television.

On February 25, 1994, Stephanopoulos and Harold Ickes had a conference call with Roger Altman to discuss the Resolution Trust Corporation's choice of Republican lawyer Jay Stephens to head the Madison Guaranty investigation as well as discussing if Stephens could be removed. The Madison Guaranty investigation would later turn into the Whitewater controversy.

In 1995, as he pulled out of a parking space in front of a restaurant in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., his car collided with a parked vehicle. Stephanopoulos was arrested and charged with leaving the scene of an accident and driving with an expired license and license plates. White House press secretary, Mike McCurry, said that President Clinton told Stephanopoulos "not to worry about" the accident but to get his license renewed. The charge of leaving the scene of an accident was subsequently dropped.

In 1999 Stephanopoulos and James Carville were sued for defamation by Gennifer Flowers. Stephanopoulos had made comments about her allegations that she had an affair with Bill Clinton. He accused Flowers of doctoring her taped conversation with Clinton to make her story look credible. Stephanopoulos also called her story "tabloid trash", "garbage", and "crap". The suit was dismissed since his comments were not the basis for defamation.

Stephanopoulos resigned from the Clinton administration shortly after Clinton was re-elected in 1996. Stephanopoulos is credited as among the first inside the White House to recognize the damage the Lewinsky affair could cause to the Clinton presidency.

His memoir, All Too Human: A Political Education (1999), was published after he left the White House during Clinton's second term. It quickly became a number-one bestseller on The New York Times Best Seller list for five weeks. In the book, Stephanopoulos spoke of his depression and how his face broke out into hives due to the pressures of conveying the Clinton White House message. Clinton, referencing the book in his autobiography, My Life, expressed regret for the excessive pressure he placed on the young staffer.

Stephanopoulos's book covers his time with Clinton from the day he met him in September 1991, to the day Stephanopoulos left the White House in December 1996, through two presidential campaigns and four years in the White House. Stephanopoulos describes Clinton in the book as a "complicated man responding to the pressures and pleasures of public life in ways I found both awesome and appalling".

Real estate loan controversy

In 1994, columnist Jack Anderson reported that Stephanopoulos signed an $835,000 commercial real estate deal consisting of a two-story apartment, including an eyewear retailer, with a below-market loan rate from a bank owned by Hugh McColl, who had been called by President Clinton "the most enlightened banker in America". A NationsBank commercial loan officer said that this loan did "not fit our product matrix" as banks typically offer such loans for only those customers who have deep pockets and on a short-term adjustable rate basis. Stephanopoulos's real estate agent explained that "nobody making $125,000 could qualify for the property without the commercial property (lease)." One former senior bank regulator told Anderson, "If his name were George Smith, and he didn't work in the White House, this loan wouldn't have gotten made."

Regarding the controversy, NationsBank stated, "The loan described by Jack Anderson as a commercial loan to George Stephanopoulos was, in fact, a residential mortgage loan. At the time the loan commitment was made, Mr. Anderson (or his imaginary 'George Smith' who 'doesn't work in the White House') could have walked into any NationsBank Mortgage Company office in the D.C. area and received the same excellent rate and term for the same deal."

However, Stephanopoulos's realtor states that he would not have qualified for the loan without the commercial property rent. One NationsBank source states that the issuance of a residential loan on mixed-use properties is such a rarity that it was not even addressed in the "NationsBank Mortgage Corporation's Program Summary" or its "Credit Policy Manual". A NationsBank underwriting memo revealed that one of the three restrictions for mixed-use properties is that "the borrower must be the owner of the business entity". The source claims that NationsBank told the listing agent that, "We're not (interested in mixed-use properties), but we do have an appetite for this particular loan." NationsBank's primary regulator at the time was Comptroller of the Currency Eugene Ludwig, a Rhodes scholar who attended Yale Law School with President Clinton, and who had been asked to investigate NationsBank by Democratic congressmen Henry B. Gonzalez and John Dingell.