President Donald Trump said that MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell was “forced to apologize” for his reporting that by his own admission relied on a single source and was not verified.
O'Donnell apologized on air on Aug. 28 after making explosive claims about loans Trump secured, claiming a source told him that Russians co-signed the loans.
An MSNBC producer said the single source didn’t view the documents themselves. Trump’s lawyer Charles Harder sent a letter threatening legal action against NBC Universal unless a retraction and apology was issued, prompting the retraction and apology.
Trump took to Twitter Thursday morning, writing: “Crazy Lawrence O’Donnell, who has been calling me wrong from even before I announced my run for the Presidency, even being previously forced by NBC to apologize, which he did while crying, for things he said about me & The Apprentice, was again forced to apologize, this time for the most ridiculous claim of all, that Russia, Russia, Russia, or Russian oligarchs, co-signed loan documents for me, a guarantee.”
“Totally false, as is virtually everything else he, and much of the rest of the LameStream Media, has said about me for years. ALL APOLOGIZE!” Trump added.
O'Donnell made a lengthy apology in 2015 for questioning how much NBC paid Trump for “The Apprentice” reality series.
“I might be wrong. I have never said I know exactly how much Donald Trump made for the entire series. I don’t know. I’ve made semi-educated guesses about it and I don’t really care very much about it,” he said at the time. “I stupidly jumped into talking about it again on ‘Morning Joe’ today where I, in effect, hijacked a few minutes of the show to talk about this thing that I know doesn’t matter.”
Trump on Thursday added in another missive that reporting like O'Donnell’s is bad for the country.
“The totally inaccurate reporting by Lawrence O’Donnell, for which he has been forced by NBC to apologize, is NO DIFFERENT than the horrible, corrupt and fraudulent Fake News that I (and many millions of GREAT supporters) have had to put up with for years. So bad for the USA!” he said.
O'Donnell appeared on Rachel Maddow’s show on Tuesday night, making the explosive claim that Russians co-signed loans for the president’s company.
After Maddow said: “What? Really?” O'Donnell replied: “If true, that would explain every kind word Donald Trump has ever said about Russia and Vladimir Putin.”
On his own show later that night, O'Donnell said, “Now, 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. And that’s where that stands at this point. It’s going to need a lot more verification before that can be a confirmable fact.”
Michael Del Moro, a producer for MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” revealed the next morning that not only had O'Donnell not seen the documents he was reporting on, neither had the source.
Later Wednesday he said on air that he was retracting what he said the night prior and made a general apology.
Eric Trump, the Trump Organization’s executive vice president and the president’s son, said that the company still planned to take legal action for the slanderous reporting.
