President Trump’s lawyers sent a letter to MSNBC demanding a retraction and an apology for an unverified story Lawrence O’Donnell ran with on his show.
O’Donnell opened his show Tuesday night with the claim that Deutsche Bank was in possession of tax returns “related to” Trump or his immediate family. The MSNBC prime-time host alleged a source close to the bank says that the bank “is in possession of loan documents that show Donald Trump has obtained loans with co-signers, and that he would not have been able to obtain those loans without co-signers.”
He went on to claim the co-signers are “Russian billionaires close to Vladimir Putin.” O’Donnell used the information to claim that, if accurate, then it would explain Trump’s behavior toward Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
At the end of O’Donnell’s show, he went back to this story and further clarified the story was from “a single source” and that it had not been confirmed by NBC News. A producer for MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Michael Del Moro, tweeted on Wednesday that Deutsche Bank is “declining to comment” on O’Donnell’s reporting and that the source had “not seen the bank records” in question.
New: Trump attorney Charles Harder has sent a letter to NBC demanding a retraction over @Lawrence‘s Deutsche Bank claim. “These statements are false and defamatory, and extremely damaging,” Harder writes. pic.twitter.com/yhB2bYtFph
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 28, 2019
“We write concerning the false and defamatory statements published by Lawrence O’Donnell and NBC Universal … about Mr. Trump and Trump Org. in an episode of the program, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” Charles J. Harder of Harder LLP wrote in a letter to NBC Universal.
“These statements are false and defamatory, and extremely damaging,” it continued. “The only borrowers under these loans are Trump entities, and Mr. Trump is the only guarantor. 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.”
The letter concluded by saying if they did not “immediately and prominently retract, correct, and apologize for the aforementioned false and defamatory statements,” then they will “consider legal options.”
The White House also repudiated the report as well. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham stated the unverified report “is one of the reasons that a majority of Americans have lost trust in the media.”
[Opinion: How long before Lawrence O’Donnell has to retract his supposed Russia scoop?]
