August 29, 2019

USA: MSNBC News Host Lawrence O’Donnell Pushed A Potential Bombshell On Rachel Maddow's Show About Russia-Backed Loans To Donald Trump Based On An Unverified Tip He Received. Retracted Story.

The Daily Caller
written by Chuck Ross, Investigative Reporter
Wednesday August 28, 2019

Lawrence O’Donnell dropped a potential bombshell about President Donald Trump’s taxes on his MSNBC show Tuesday night, only to acknowledge later in his broadcast that the report will need “a lot more verification.”

O’Donnell opened his show with his possible scoop, hyping it during an exchange with Rachel Maddow, who hosts the show prior to his.

“I want to get your reaction to it now, because I don’t want you to leave the building,” said O’Donnell.

“This single source close to Deutsche Bank has told me that Donald Trump’s loan documents there show that he has co-signers. That’s how he was able to obtain those loans, and that the co-signers are Russian oligarchs,” he continued.

Maddow, who has opened many a show with salacious and unverified Trump scoops of her own, appeared floored by the news.

“What?” she replied.

Deutsche Bank, which has done business with Trump for years, strongly indicated in court filings that it has possession of Trump’s taxes earlier in the day. House Democrats have sued Deutsche Bank and Capital One, which has also worked with Trump, for Trump tax documents and other financial records. Trump and members of his family have sued to block the banks from releasing the documents.

O’Donnell’s report, if accurate, would support Democrats’ longstanding theory that Deutsche Bank holds the clues to any illicit links between Trump and Russia. Democrats and MSNBC hosts like O’Donnell and Maddow have suggested Trump has financial links to Russian, which might make him beholden to powerful oligarchs, or even Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But O’Donnell added new details to his reporting at the end of his show. In addition to reiterating that it was based on a single source close to Deutsche Bank, O’Donnell said his own network had not verified the information. He also said he had not seen any documentation to back up the source’s claim.

“As I said at the beginning of this hour, and I want to say this carefully: A source close to Deutsche Bank revealed to me — a single source close to Deutsche Bank — that Donald Trump’s tax returns show that he pays very little income tax, and more importantly, that his loans with Deutsche Bank have Russian co-signers,” O’Donnell said.

“I want to stress, that’s a single source. This has not been confirmed by NBC News. I have not seen any documentation from Deutsche Bank that supports this and verifies this. This is just a single source who has revealed that to me.”

“It’s going to need a lot more verification before that can be a confirmable fact.”

An MSNBC producer for “Morning Joe” said on Twitter on Wednesday morning that NBC was unable to verify O’Donnell’s story, and that the source had not seen the underlying documents.
Trump has long denied that he has business ties to Russia. The former real estate mogul partnered with the billionaire Agalarov family to host the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013. Trump has also tried several times to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Trump’s tax attorneys, Sheri Dillon and William Nelson, said in a March 8, 2017, letter that Trump’s tax returns do not show any income from Russian sources, or that he owed any interest to Russian lenders, or that any Russians held equity states in Trump’s companies.

The letter did not address whether any Russians have co-signed Trump loans. Dillon did not respond to a request for comment. Trump’s lawyers, Marc Mukasey and William Consovoy, also did not respond to a request for comment about O’Donnell’s claim.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham criticized O’Donnell’s report in a statement to Fox News on Wednesday.

“This is one of the reasons that a majority of Americans have lost trust in the media. Instead of applying ethics and standards to their reporting, journalists and left-wing outlets have weaponized the media, using it to attack and harass people with little to no regard for the truth,” she said.

MSNBC did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
This guy's tweet above received over 60 thousand likes and over 23 thousand retweets. This information has been confirmed to be bogus by the media person who reported it and this guy hasn't bothered to delete this tweet with bogus news. I checked to see if Lawrence O'Donnell deleted his lying news reporting on Twitter, as you can see in the above tweet, he has not. This is what the Left does. (emphasis mine)
These tweets above are only two of over two thousand replies to this bogus news reported by Seth Abramson and Lawrence O'Donnell. (emphasis mine)
NY Post
written by Carl Campanile
Wednesday August 28, 2019

Cable news host Lawrence O’Donnell was forced to admit he was wrong to claim that Russian moguls close to Vladimir Putin had co-signed huge bank loans to Donald Trump before he became president.

The mea culpa from the MSNBC host came after the president’s lawyer threatened to sue O’Donnell and the network for defamation.

“Last night I made an error in judgment by reporting an item about the president’s finances that didn’t go through our rigorous verification and standards process. I shouldn’t have reported it and I was wrong to discuss it on the air. I will address the issue on my show tonight,” O’Donnell, who hosts “Last Word,” said on Twitter Wednesday.

And indeed, as he went on the air, he apologized again, saying his reporting had been “simply not good enough.”

He continued, “Tonight we are retracting the story. We don’t know whether the information is inaccurate. But the fact is we do know it wasn’t ready for broadcast and for that I apologize.”
He had tweeted out the erroneous report, writing, “A source close to Deutsche Bank says Trump’s tax returns show he pays very little income tax and, more importantly, that his loans have Russian co-signers. If true, that explains every kind word Trump has ever said about Russia and Putin.”

O’Donnell walked back the claim after Trump’s personal lawyer Charles Harder demanded a retraction and an apology, which was reported by Deadline.com.

“These statements are false and defamatory, and extremely damaging,” Harder — who won Hulk Hogan millions of dollars in his sex tape case against the former Gawker website — said in a letter Wednesday to NBC Universal’s executive vice president and General Counsel Susan Weiner and SVP for Litigation Daniel Kummer over O’Donnell’s report.

“The only borrowers under these loans are Trump entities, and Mr. Trump is the only guarantor,” Harder added in the two-page letter. “Numerous documents for each of these loans are also recorded, publicly available and searchable online. Thus, actual malice can easily be proven based on your reckless disregard of the truth and unreasonable reliance on an alleged ‘source’ who you will not even identify in your story and likely is seeking to mislead you and the public for political reasons or other ulterior motives.”
UDPATE 8/29/19 at 1:11pm: Added tweets below.
UPDATE 8/29/19 at 4:35pm: Added tweets below.
UPDATE 8/29/19 at 8:14pm: Added tweets below.

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 12:38 PM

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