MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell Retracts Report on Trump Loans, Apologizes
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MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell has retracted his earlier report on President Trump‘s finances and issued an on-air apology.
On Wednesday’s edition of his nightly news show The Last Word, O’Donnell admitted that the allegation he passed along — which claimed that Russian oligarchs co-signed a number of loans for Trump — “wasn’t ready for reporting.” He did couch his earlier report from “a single source” by saying, “if true,” but he now concedes that caveat “was simply not good enough.”
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O’Donnell did not run the report through NBC News’ standard vetting process before putting it on the air, and he says now that if he had, “I would not have been permitted to report it.” While noting that Trump’s attorneys demanded that he retract the story and threatened legal action if he did not, the host then announced: “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.”
Earlier on Wednesday, O’Donnell tweeted that he “made an error in judgment” in reporting the allegation without vetting it first: “I shouldn’t have reported it and I was wrong to discuss it on the air.”
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