Trump rips MSNBC’s O’Donnell after story retraction: ‘So bad for the USA!’

President Trump on Thursday lashed out at MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell after the host issued a retraction over a story alleging Trump obtained loans with Russian oligarchs as co-signers. 

Trump said the report is “no different” than the other “Fake News” and issued a call for other outlets to “ALL APOLOGIZE!”

{mosads}”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!” Trump tweeted Thursday. 

“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!”

….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!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2019 

O’Donnell retracted the story Wednesday night after Trump attorney Charles Hader sent a letter to NBCUniversal saying that O’Donnell’s Tuesday report was false and defamatory.

O’Donnell did not say the story was inaccurate in his retraction, but rather said it relied on a single source and did not go through MSNBC’s “rigorous verification and standards process.” 

“Tonight we are retracting the story,” he added. “We don’t know whether the information is inaccurate, but the fact is, we do know it wasn’t ready for broadcast. For that, I apologize.”

O’Donnell did tell viewers the story was single source during the report on Tuesday night.

A source told O’Donnell that Trump’s loan documents from Deutsche Bank include Russian oligarchs as co-signers. 

“I stress ‘if true,’ because this is a single source who has told me that Deutsche Bank obtained tax returns,” he said. 

On Wednesday, the MSNBC host said that had the story been vetted further, “I would not have been permitted to report it.”

An MSNBC producer later acknowledged that the information came from a source who had not seen the banking records.

The report followed a court filing Tuesday in which Deutsche Bank said that it had tax returns relevant to House Democrats’ subpoenas for financial records of Trump, his family and his businesses. The bank did not publicly identify whose tax return it had.