It exhibits a stunning lack of rigor for a news organization that was pounced upon by Trump’s lawyers.
NEW YORK — MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday retracted his story about supposed Russian ties to President Donald Trump’s finances and apologized for reporting it — just as Trump’s lawyer demanded.His public pull-back unfolded quickly in the opening minute of “The Last Word,” where 24 hours earlier the cable news host said that a source had told him that Deutsche Bank documents showed that Russian oligarchs had co-signed a loan application for Trump.
Trump’s lawyer, Charles Harder, had written to NBC on Wednesday afternoon, saying the story was false and defamatory and threatening legal action if it wasn’t disowned. Harder said the story could have been disproven with an internet search.“We don’t know whether the information is inaccurate,” he said later on the air. “But the fact is we do know it wasn’t ready for broadcast and for that I apologize.”....
In court on Tuesday, Deutsche Bank DB, +0.84% had revealed that it possessed some of Trump’s tax returns that had never been released to the public, leading to speculation about what information those documents contained. The episode exhibited a stunning lack of rigor for a news organization. In a letter to Susan Weiner, general counsel of Comcast’s CMCSA, +0.91% NBC Universal, and Daniel Kummer, the company’s senior vice president for litigation, Harder called O’Donnell’s statements “false and defamatory, and extremely damaging.”While it provided ammunition for Trump’s frequent attacks on the media, the story had not been addressed on the president’s Twitter account Wednesday evening.
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