On Wednesday, August 28, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell walked back a mind-blowing claim he’d made on-air the night before, the allegation that Russian oligarchs had been co-signers of Trump
He’d attributed this potential mega-blockbuster to a single uncorroborated, anonymous source, who he said was “close to Deutsche Bank.” In his retraction he affirmed he had not run the story through NBC’s editorial verification process, though he was also careful to say he didn’t know whether the tip was accurate or not.
He should count himself lucky he wasn’t bounced from his job.
As someone who’s worked as an investigative journalist for an NBC outlet, I can attest to how exacting the fact-checking process can be – and how unthinkable a single-source story of this sensitivity.
Still, I cannot imagine O’Donnell made a “dumb” mistake.
He committed a grievous journalistic error, to be sure, and went through the obligatory, wholly necessary and possibly inadequate motions of making amends – the retraction, the acknowledgement of violating company policy.
My first reaction to his display of humble pie was that it proves journalism itself has been degraded by Trump’ own perversion of truth. Desperate exponents of accountability like O’Donnell would seem to be skirting the line out of desperation.
On a more pragmatic level, I wondered at his failure to recognize that in financial reporting precise wording can make the difference between absolute accuracy and the appearance of error. When O’Donnell alleged, based on his decidedly problematic source, that Russian oligarchs were “co-signers” of the Trump loans, my own “inner editor” howled in protest. I recalled an estimable book by journalist Craig Unger that carefully dissects how Russian oligarchs made early investments in New York real estate, including, he says, Trump’s empire.
In “House of Trump, House of Putin,” Unger explains how shadowy Russian fat cats funneled suspect money quite legally through “shell companies” because “the U.S. and U.K. unlike most western democracies permit anonymous ownership of real estate.” This loose legal environment, he contends, bred money launderers and willing accomplices.
Thus, if the oligarchs O’Donnell has in mind operated true to form, they would not have “co-signed” anything. They would have found ways to mask whatever collateral they may have extended to Trump through Deutsche Bank, if indeed such transactions took place.
So, it seems to me, O’Donnell used language from the get-go that didn’t quite compute. Trump’s own lawyer claimed in his retraction demand to NBC that “the only borrowers under these loans are Trump entities, and Mr. Trump is the only Guarantor” – a nice bit of tap-dancing in itself.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think O’Donnell should have gone with a single-source story even with more nuanced language.
But I do believe he felt that whatever truth he’d grasped had substance, and urgency. No one with his experience would simply have spit-balled, not with what is at stake.
In fact, he could have hedged, protected himself and NBC, and still have made the point he was seemingly getting at. After all his years as a Congressional staffer, TV scriptwriter, and on-air commentator, he clearly has the smarts to be able to frame speculative information in safely speculative terms. He might have said, for instance, that certain new information, as yet unverified, has raised questions about whether the Deutsche bank files show Russian involvement in Trump loans. A contextual reference to Don Jr.’s claims in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” would have lent credibility.
O’Donnell’s pundit-status gives him more latitude than would be available to a reporter in presenting hypothesis or guesswork. Though a “hypothetical” would have had less impact than the bald assertion he made — and less legal exposure– it could still have nudged public discussion into areas that remain woefully under-explored by Congressional investigators and the Justice Department.
As all of us can see, Trump is now using stall tactics which he perfected as a businessman – tying opponents up in frivolous litigation simply to tire them out and run out the clock. Such cuteness may be acceptable in the bandit’s paradise that passes for the New York real estate market, but it is anathema to the transparency required for checks and balances in government and effective Congressional oversight.
And let’s face it, there’s not been much of any of that recently. Traditional watchdogs are sitting on their tails and allowing Trump and his GOP acolytes to run rings around them. The failure of House Democrats to initiate an aggressive, proudly explicit impeachment inquiry (never mind a formal resolution) fosters the impression there is nothing to investigate. This, even as Trump flouts every norm, every standard of truth, and any number of laws.
Pelosi-style “caution” in these circumstances is not a virtue and merely encourages lawlessness. And the Democrats’ failure to frame a single coherent message about all this reeks of fecklessness.
Robert Mueller’s own failure to investigate Trump’s finances borders on moral abdication. Perhaps he and his investigators concluded this was better left to the FBI counter-intelligence experts.
But in case you hadn’t noticed, Barr’s Justice Department and the GOP are working hand-in-glove to discredit whatever counterintelligence investigation may be underway — by assaulting the credibility of the Steele dossier, related FISA warrants and all other potential predicates of a counter-intel probe.
On top of all this, defectors from Trump World, like Jim Mattis, have adopted what they view as an honorable code of studied doubletalk in lieu of openly criticizing the commander in chief for his obliterating behavior.
No wonder Lawrence O’Donnell stepped off the reservation, as lamentable as this may be in traditional journalistic terms. The fact is, all other mechanisms of accountability are failing us.
You may argue that’s all the more reason for journalists to hold to the straight and narrow since anything less would rob them of desperately needed legitimacy and credibility. But it is also true that the straight and narrow is going nowhere because of the lack of follow-through by those who could make a difference.
Against this backdrop I can understand — if not forgive — O’Donnell’s recklessness.
In attempting to explain what he did I keep circling back to a curious, possibly relevant piece of news out of the House Ways and Means Committee, which is seeking Trump’s financial records through court action. In a recent legal filing, the Committee revealed that on July 29 a Federal whistleblower had alerted its members to “credible allegations” of “inappropriate” interference in the IRS’ audit procedures, presumably involving Trump finances. The inference – at least for me — was that someone might have screwed with the records to hide something inconvenient for Trump. (Like the identities of financial backers? Who knows?)
This tantalizing tidbit surfaced briefly in the daily news cycle and then disappeared. O’Donnell once served as Staff Director for the Senate Finance Committee and has extensive sources on the Hill, particularly among staffers concerned with money matters. Did his intemperance on-air have something to do with the still opaque disclosure of this whistleblower or some other ticking time bomb hidden in Congressional records. Did he mean to jog insiders into revealing to the rest of us what they have?
Maybe that’s giving O’Donnell too much credit. But if his shocking rush to disclosure emboldens some still-too-shy source to speak out publicly or to Congress or causes a duly mandated watchdog to dig deeper, then perversely and improbably Trump’s own outrages will have spawned their own antidote. It will then be left to more traditional keepers of the norms to get journalism, and the country, back to the straight and narrow.