-Our next guest is an Emmy-winning journalist
who hosts "This Week with George Stephanopoulos"
Sunday mornings and co-anchors "Good Morning America"
weekdays on ABC.
Please welcome back to the show George Stephanopoulos.
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
-Welcome to the show. -Good to be back.
-You have a congratulations in order.
You just celebrated a 20th wedding anniversary
with Ali Wentworth. -Yes.
I'm very lucky. -Fantastic comedian, writer.
-Did you you do anything special for your 20th?
-We actually didn't, no. [ Laughter ]
It was one of those things where we both had to go visit
our parents that weekend. -Oh, that's very nice.
-Yeah, it was just something that had to happen,
but we had a little celebration at home.
And we -- you know -- I don't know
how long you've been married. -I don't know, either.
[ Laughter ]
-You know, everybody tells you, "Oh, you're gonna blink,
and it's gonna go by." -Yeah.
-It's so true. I cannot believe
we've been together 20 years,
but it's been the happiest 20 years of my life.
-Well, congratulations on that. [ Applause ]
I have a lot of questions for you about your work,
but I want to start asking, what time does your day start
hosting a morning show the way you do?
-I get up at 2:30. -2:30 in the morning.
-So this is nighttime for me. -Yeah.
So you could set your alarm a little earlier
and watch this when it airs. -Exactly.
-So 2:30 in the morning, you get up.
and is that just for the purposes --
-It's the way my body works. You know, I get up, I meditate.
And, you know, 7:00 a.m. --
We start to do some stuff at 6:00.
7:00 a.m. has to be the middle of my day.
-Sure. It can't be like I'm rolling out of bed, so...
-So how often can you actually go out
and do something in the evening? -Almost never.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ]
So for your 20th anniversary, you had a brunch.
[ Laughter ] You had a romantic brunch.
-Early-bird special. -I want to ask you about
a recent interview you did that received a lot of attention.
You interviewed Alec Baldwin.
You were the first person to interview him on camera.
I can only imagine how stressful it must be
to talk to someone who has gone through
the traumatic experience that he just went through.
-It was crazy, you know. I've probably done, like you,
thousands of interviews over the last 20 years.
I had never had an experience this intense.
He walked in by himself. The entire crew went silent.
And for the next hour, it was just minute by minute,
gripping emotion from him.
And it's all so close to the surface.
I mean, he's described it as a one-in-a-trillion accident.
It was a one-in-a-trillion accident,
but he was holding the gun, and his cinematographer is dead.
"How do you live with that?" is something --
You know, that was the big question I had for him.
And it was so clear that this was all so close to the surface.
I think he probably wasn't sitting down in the chair
for a minute and a half before he started getting emotional.
And the entire hour was like that.
But to his credit, he answered every question,
went through the entire day with what happened.
The investigation is still going on.
I think he just wanted to come out and to say
his side of the story and say how badly he felt.
-It's very wonderful when you can provide
this sort of storytelling of the things
that everybody is thinking about.
And you're doing that, as well, not just with that interview,
which I think everybody wanted to hear what Alec had to say.
You have a couple of shows on Hulu right now.
One is about Christopher Steele.
And obviously much has been written about his dossier.
How are we to take Christopher Steele right now,
based on the fact that obviously there was a very partisan split
as far as how he was evaluated at first,
and now where -- how would you hold him as a journalist?
-That's a great question. And we talked it through
with my team for hours and hours
both before and after the interview.
I think, you look at the broad outlines,
he was basically writing about Russian contacts with Trump
and the Trump campaign in 2016.
Robert Mueller, you know, sort of verified most of that.
On the other hand, there were some other things
in the dossier, like the famous pee tape,
like the idea that Michael Cohen,
who was Trump's lawyer, went to Prague to work out
some deal with the Russians, that there is zero evidence
that has come forward to back that up.
And, in fact, Mueller even said that he, more or less,
could disprove the Michael Cohen stuff.
So he was wrong on the most sensational things,
or hasn't been able to verify the most sensational things.
But in the broad outline, this stuff did happen.
There were contacts between Russia
and the Trump campaign in 2016.
And I think that gets lost in some of the coverage
of Christopher Steele right now, because on these big things
that got so much attention, he hasn't been able to prove it.
-And it does seem like some journalists
are having to go back and reflect on the fact
that maybe they sort of ran to the Steele dossier
a little bit faster -- -Did the people really do that?
I mean the Steele dossier -- -I guess that's my question.
-It didn't come out during the campaign.
It came out after the campaign. -Sure, but it did seem like,
perhaps, it made good television
to talk about the Steele dossier.
-Right. And a lot of people did. A lot of people went too far.
I think we at ABC were very careful with it.
We didn't sensationalize the claims in any way,
and we didn't report what we couldn't verify.
But I think some did take it too far.
-You also tell a story, another Hulu show --
this is about someone who stopped
a homegrown terrorist attack. And are you surprised,
or, were you surprised how little
people knew about this story? -This is an amazing story.
This guy is a guy named Dan Day, Garden City, Kansas.
Unemployed security guard, average guy, two kids,
50-something years old.
He's kind of a Trumper, kind of a conservative.
In 2015, he fell in with some white supremacists.
He was horrified by what he saw,
and he became an informant for the FBI.
Was an FBI informant for 15 months
as these people started to plan what would have been
the deadliest terror attack in American history --
domestic terror attack in American history.
They were gonna blow up the entire Somali community
in Garden City, Kansas.
We have the tapes that are in the documentary about that.
It didn't get all that much attention
because the plot was foiled
three weeks before the 2016 election.
The bombs were supposed to go off the day after
the 2016 election, because they didn't want
to help Hillary Clinton and all of that.
But this story, this man was so heroic, so selfless
and put himself and his family at risk to stop
what would've been one of the most horrifying things
you'd ever see. -When you talk to someone
like that, do you get the sense that they understand now
their own heroism?
-Every once in a while on "Good Morning America,"
we meet people, as well, who save people from a burning fire,
from a shark or something like that.
To a person, they always say, "No, I'm not a hero."
And when any person looking at what they did would say,
"I'm not sure I could've done that.
I'm not sure I could've put my family at risk.
I'm not sure I could've been hanging out
with these violent people who were gonna do
horrible things and maybe even put a bullet in my head,"
and he just kept on persisting in order to stop it.
To this day, he doesn't believe he's a hero.
He certainly is.
-I would agree with that, as well.
Can I ask, you know, those must be assignments
that any journalist would look forward to,
getting to talk to a hero like that, telling his story,
getting to talk to Christopher Steele.
What is the worst assignment you've ever been given?
[ Laughter ]
One of the best April Fools jokes my wife ever played on me,
it was years and years ago on "Good Morning America."
You know, you often have to promote things
on this show, as well. -Yeah.
-And I was in the middle of the show.
And she got the executive producers
to come into my ear and say, "You have to fly to L.A.
right after the show and go interview the cast
of some show that was definitely gonna be cancelled
three weeks later." [ Laughter ]
And she saw me starting to turn red on set.
The entire crew was watching, saying,
"You got to take him out of his misery.
He's gonna blow up on air." [ Laughter ]
They saved me. -That was very nice.
Your "GMA" colleague, Michael Strahan,
is gonna go to space. -Yeah.
It's been postponed, I guess, for a couple days.
-Really? -It was supposed to be tomorrow.
But there's some weather issue, but it's gonna
probably happen this weekend.
And he's ready to go. -Would you go?
-No. -Nor would I.
[ Laughter ] Nor would I.
-But glad he is. Not even tempted.
Not even a little bit. -Not even a little bit.
Because you know what? They got cameras up there,
so I know what it looks like. Yeah.
-It's fine, yeah. -They're like,
"You can't believe what it looks like."
It's like, "You took a picture.
I know exactly what it looks like."
-And we're gonna broadcast it, and all of you can watch.
Good bless you, Michael.
-God bless you. I'm glad he's doing it.
Hey, thank you so much for being here.
Always a pleasure, George. George Stephanopoulos.
"This Week with George Stephanopoulos"
airs Sunday mornings on ABC.