ABC will fork $15 million to President-elect Donald Trump's presidential library fund to bail out big-mouth anchor George Stephanopoulos for his false assertions that Trump had been found liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll, according to the terms of the settlement. 

The agreement, signed Friday and made public Saturday, characterizes the payment as a "charitable contribution."

ABC News weasels simply added an editor's note at the bottom of a March 10, 2024 story headlined, "Nancy Mace defends her support for Trump after he was found liable for sexual assault." They had no choice. The settlement demanded it.

"Editor's Note: ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC's This Week on March 10, 2024," the suspect apology states. 

The story and Stephanopoulos badgered the South Carolina Republican congresswoman for her support of Trump, who in a May 2023 civil case was found liable for sexually abusing Carroll decades ago. 

The jury in a trial that reeked of politics in another New York kangaroo court rejected Carroll's claim that she was raped in a posh Manhattan department store. Stephanopoulos repeatedly and falsely said Trump had been "found liable for rape" during a March interview with Mace on ABC's "This Week."

Trump, who was at the time the leading candidate for the GOP's presidential nomination and hounded by political prosecutions aimed at knocking the Democrats' top political enemy out of the race, quickly filed a defamation lawsuit accusing the ABC News anchor and former Clinton crony with "actual malice or with a reckless disregard for the truth."  

Trump has denied Carroll's allegations. Carroll apparently couldn't remember precisely when the alleged sexual abuse took place, but she's confident it occurred nearly 30 years ago. 

Interestingly, as my Federalist colleague Tristan Justice wrote earlier this year, former Clinton White House Communications Director Stephanopoulos served as President Bill Clinton's "point man orchestrating smear campaigns against Clinton's accusers of sexual misconduct throughout the '90s."