Politics & Power Quote by George Stephanopoulos

Stephanopoulos is doing a familiar Washington magic trick: turning absence of proof into proof of absence, then laundering that claim through the language of democratic closure. The cadence stacks reassurance on top of reassurance, as if repetition can harden a political narrative into fact: lots of “time and money,” the public “saw through,” the ballot box “voted,” “nothing has turned up,” therefore “did nothing wrong.” Each clause is a rung on a ladder meant to lift the listener above the messy middle ground where investigations often live: incomplete, partisan, technical, and rarely satisfying.

The specific intent is defensive inoculation. By framing scrutiny as wasteful obsession (“awful lot of time and money”), he casts investigators as zealots and the president as a victim of elite fixation. The appeal to “the American people” isn’t just populist frosting; it’s a pressure tactic. If voters have already rendered judgment, continued inquiry becomes not oversight but disrespect for the electorate. That’s the subtext: stop digging, because digging is un-American.

Context matters here because Stephanopoulos isn’t speaking as a neutral civic referee. He’s a media figure with deep political DNA, translating institutional conflict into a digestible storyline for mass consumption. The rhetorical move collapses legal accountability into electoral legitimacy, implying that re-election (or sustained support) retroactively absolves. It’s persuasive because it flatters the audience’s desire for finality and fatigue with scandal, even as it sidesteps the inconvenient truth that investigations are designed to test power, not validate popularity.