UPDATE: Lawrence O’Donnell has issued a statement on the story:

Last night I made an error in judgment by reporting an item about the president’s finances that didn’t go through our rigorous verification and standards process. I shouldn’t have reported it and I was wrong to discuss it on the air. I will address the issue on my show tonight. — Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) August 28, 2019

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Fast-tracked impeachment hearings will occur this fall if the bombshell report is true that President Donald Trump had loans with Deutsche Bank co-signed by Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

“The source close to Deutsche Bank says that the co-signers of Donald Trump’s Deutsche Bank loans are Russian billionaires close to Vladimir Putin,” MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell reported Tuesday.

For analysis, the host interviewed NBC News national affairs analyst John Heilemann.

“Got to stress ‘if true,’ but if true, the reporting that you have your source, it’s the skeleton key, right, that opens -— picks the lock on so many fundamental mysteries of the Trump era, the ones we thought Robert Mueller was going to answer and we now know the reason that Robert Mueller didn’t answer them, all the connections, the nexus with Russia on a million levels, political, financial, security, everything else, criminal potentially, was because he was basically told he couldn’t look at this stuff,” Heilemann explained. “This was the stuff he wasn’t allowed to go for. He couldn’t go looking for the skeleton key.”

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“So now if we have the skeleton key, it picks a lot of locks and answers a lot of questions and also puts Trump in a very difficult place politically, partly because we’re barrelling towards a re-election campaign and we’re also on the clock for the impeachment hearings. We also know it’s almost Labor Day. We know decisions have to get made,” he continued.

“And in this narrative, this moment, if the skeleton key suddenly were to emerge, it would, I think, make impeachment proceedings absolutely inevitable starting this fall,” he added.

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