“Remember this about the CBS lawyers: they are the weakest, most cowardly corporate lawyers in America. [Lawyers do what’s in their clients’ best interests. The network isn’t going to risk a fine and a fight with the FCC over a dying late night show’s host with weak ratings interviewing a Texas politician that nobody ever heard of.] They are actually in a tie with ABC’s lawyers, who we will get to in a moment. The CBS lawyers who are now trying to tell Stephen Colbert, who can be a guest on his show [Fact: the lawyers told Colbert that he could have his guest, but that it would require him to interview that guest’s opponents in the upcoming Texas primary. O’Donnell knows this, and was deliberately misleading his audience, who are, by definition, gullible morons.] work for a parent company that agreed to pay Donald Trump $16 million to settle a frivolous lawsuit by Donald Trump against “60 Minutes,” which Donald Trump had no chance of winning. Absolutely zero chance of winning. [O’Donnell doesn’t know what he’s talking about, as is often the case. The evidence proved that CBS altered the Harris interview to help her in the election. The law suit was a long shot, but that didn’t make it frivolous. It was not frivolous under the definition of the term, which allows suits that argue for new interpretations of the law. CBS settled because they knew discovery would produce damning emails and other documents proving that the “60 minutes” team was engaged in election interference. A win for Trump (and the U.S.) would be smoking gun proof of just how biased and corrupt the news media is. CBS got off easy.]
But those cowardly corporate lawyers agreed to pay Donald Trump $16 million in what Stephen Colbert correctly called, quote, “a big, fat bribe.” [A settlement isn’t a bribe, could not be, can’t be, and it is straight up misrepresentation for O’Donnell to say it is. Citing a comedian as a legal authority is desperate even for O’Donnell.]Those lawyers should be witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the United States Senate right now, for that bribe. [Like so many Democrats, O’Donnell doesn’t know what the Constitutional grounds for impeachment are. True, his favorite party’s House members will, and they have already, try to impeach Trump for having the audacity to exist, but a legal settlement of a lawsuit against a misbehaving corporation won’t sustain even Democrats’ desperation to overturn the 2024 election.] That is their filthy spot that they now occupy in American political and corporate legal history, right beside the ABC lawyers for their corporate parent, Disney, that agreed to pay Donald Trump $15 million in a frivolous lawsuit against ABC News, a lawsuit that Donald Trump would not have won. [The ABC defamation suit was also not frivolous, and had a much better chance of winning than the “60 Minutes” case. Disney/ABC also had reason to fear discovery, and the case risked giving the Supreme Court an opportunity to overturn Times v. Sullivan, the landmark case that lets the news media defame public figures “by mistake” or over-enthusiasm, as long as it isn’t “with malice.”]
The entire legal team at ABC and Disney disgraced themselves, along with the corporate chieftains of Disney’s Magic Kingdom, in their acquiescence to Donald Trump in their settling a lawsuit that Donald Trump would not have won. [Pssst! Larry! Repeating an ignorant assertion doesn’t make it any more true or persuasive.]
The lawyers did not have the courage to use their legal skills to fight Donald Trump’s attempt to get money from this company. Donald Trump’s illegal interference in their business. And so they paid them off. [ All lawsuits against a company are attempts to get money from the company: that’s how the system works. The FCC’s enforcement of its regulations isn’t illegal. There is no evidence or even a logical surmise that Trump had any interest in a Texas Democratic primary.]
America has three legacy networks: NBC, ABC, and CBS. They are our oldest networks, and two of them have handed over big, fat bribes to Donald Trump with the approval of the most cowardly corporate lawyers known to be currently working in America. [Yes, Larry, we heard you the first two times.]Not one of those lawyers offered a principled resignation over the big fat bribe.Not one of them. [Lawyers, unlike MSNOW talking heads, understand that there is nothing “principled’ about opposing a client’s desire to settle a law suit rather than engage in risky and embarrassing litigation.] We have seen lawyers publicly resigning from the Trump Justice Department on principle, from Washington to Minneapolis, but not one CBS lawyer, not one ABC lawyer.” [This would be because the lawyers are different, they have different principles, the issues involved were different, and there is a big difference between having the government as a client and a private company. If Larry could think clearly, he’d realize that by his analysis it was Trump’s lawyers who should have resigned.]
In short, O’Donnell misrepresented the issues, passed along ignorant assertions and biased analysis, expressed little of substance but the usual MSNOW Trump hatred, and was legally, factually, and logically wrong without passing along anything of value to his audience. O’Donnell adopted Colbert’s already disproved claims about the matter because Colbert hates Trump, so he must be supported.
O’Donnell is flamingly unprofessional, and for any news organization to not only tolerate him but feature him is signature significance. If O’Donnell were the only disgraceful journalist deceiving the public on the channel it would condemn MSNOW, but he is one of many. he’s not even the worst.
Think about that for a bit…
Ethics Alarms 
From his wiki page:
In a 2005 interview, O’Donnell called himself a “practical European socialist” O’Donnell also declared himself a “socialist” on the November 6, 2010, Morning Joe show, stating: “I am not a progressive. I am not a liberal who is so afraid of the word that I had to change my name to ‘progressive’. Liberals amuse me. I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the extreme left of you mere liberals.” On the August 1, 2011, episode of The Last Word, O’Donnell further explained: “I have been calling myself a socialist ever since I first read the definition of socialism in the first economics class I took in college.”
Also, he graduated from Harvard. And his father was a lawyer! Kids of big deal lawyers generally get a lot of exposure to legal issues. O’Donnell clearly knows better.
Lawrence O’Donnell bashed Mitt Romney in 2012 to the point where I said Romney’s oldest son should pull a Will Smith on him (although that incident hadn’t happened yet).
I think MSNOW, CBS, and ABC need some longstanding bloviator to spin the settlements to Trump so that their base doesn’t start thinking, “Maybe there is something to the accusations that these ‘news’ stations are nothing more than party propagandists, like Fox News…” At least, that explains why you don’t have management imposing any standards on O’Donnell, at least in this case. The fact he has been around for decades should mean that the base trusts his analyses, no need for independent research on the topic.
Jack wrote, “In short, O’Donnell misrepresented the issues, passed along ignorant assertions and biased analysis, expressed little of substance but the usual MSNOW Trump hatred, and was legally, factually, and logically wrong without passing along anything of value to his audience.”
I completely agree and only have this to say about it…
They, the political left, keeps going out of their way to prove the truth to that statement.
O’Donnell is appalling, but there are many in that basket. This is another example of the Left reacting moronically to simple enforcement of laws that have been on the books for decades. And a critical reason not to let them in charge again.
As a tangent, why did CBS not just let Colbert go immediately? Usually when someone is fired a security team watches as he gathers his personal belongings, then walks him out the door. Update security protocols, lock him out of the computer system – SOP. Colbert is already doing damage on his way out, and could sabotage even more. He has nothing to lose, so the smart thing is to cut him loose.
With apologies to Billy Madison, but some things just cannot be improved on:
Mr. O’Donnell, what you have just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent rant were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in you audience is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
It speaks volumes about the state of our society and especially our media that people are actually paid to say things like this. More tragic is the fact that there are actual willing consumers of this dreck, and even more tragic is that a significant portion, perhaps even an outright majority of those watching it actually find it an accurate and reasonable commentary.
There is no need to ethically analyze deliberately biased and misleading blather like this, it is per se unethical. But any audience who is so jaded and biased that they will, even for a minute, entertain this crap as true and rational is either so mis-educated that they need immediate intervention or every bit as unethical as O’Donnell.
This is depressing on so many levels.