That Trump would use a congratulatory call from the Argentine president, Mauricio Macri, to promote his personal business interests in such a tawdry, crass way seemed to confirm the worst fears of his critics about the potential abuse of executive power.

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But the Trump-favor-seeking story may end up fitting better into another narrative of post-election U.S. politics: the easy spread of thinly sourced or even fake news.

Ivan Pavlovsky, a spokesman for Macri who was present in the room during their call, said the claims were false and that “nothing like that ever happened.”

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“They didn’t talk about any investments or any tower,” said Pavlovsky, reached by phone in Buenos Aires. “They talked about good relations between Argentina and the United States and the time they first met each other, more than 20 years ago” in New York City, said Pavlovsky.

Trump transition spokesman Jason Miller also denied the report in an email to USA Today.

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The allegation that caught fire on social media Monday started on the previous evening’s broadcast of “Journalism for All.”

Lanata, best known in Argentina as a fierce and irreverent critic of former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, said during the show’s opening monologue that he had a story about Trump that was “half joking, half serious.”

“Macri called him,” Lanata told his audience. “Trump asked him to approve a tower he’s building in Buenos Aires. It wasn’t only a conversation about geopolitics.”

It wasn’t clear whether Lanata meant the allegations were “half serious” or whether the story so defied credulity as to seem like a joke. Nor did he reveal the sources for his claim.

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During the segment about the alleged conversation, one of Lanata’s guests, journalist Romina Manguel, said Trump had, years earlier, joined a group of investors who had purchased a parking garage with the intention of building a tower.

The $100 million project was held up by red tape and currency controls imposed by then-president Kirchner, a leftist, and the permits for the 35-story tower had since expired, according to Argentina’s La Nacion.

Pavlovsky adamantly denied that the project came up during the brief conversation between Trump and Macri. “They talked about maintaining good relations between the two countries,” he said.

While officials denied any impropriety, one unusual aspect of the call was confirmed: Trump's daughter Ivanka joined the conversation with the Argentine leader. Macri told a Japanese newspaper reporter in an interview published Monday that he had met Donald Trump years earlier, when the politicians were both businessmen. “In the call [on Nov. 14], I also talked with his daughter,” Macri said, according to the newspaper Asahi Shimbun. “I have known her since her infant days.” He did not provide details.