..seems like I found a workaround. Commenting out the msg at the end of the .bashrc (home/USER/.bashrc) solved it. That also get rid of the banner in ssh login but I can live with that. (Or maybe do a custom one in sshd.conf?). If anyone have a different solution, please reply.
/home/USER/.bashrc now looks like this
# enable bash completion in interactive shells
if ! shopt -oq posix; then
if [ -f /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion ]; then
. /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion
elif [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
. /etc/bash_completion
fi
fi
alias usage='du -sk * | sort -n | perl -ne '\''($s,$f)=split(m{\t});for (qw(K M G)) {if($s<1024) {printf("%.1f",$s);print "$_\t$f"; last};$s=$s/1024}'\'
alias ls="ls --color"
# Powerline
if [ -f /usr/share/powerline/bindings/bash/powerline.sh ]; then
source /usr/share/powerline/bindings/bash/powerline.sh
fi
# Linux Lite Custom Terminal
LLVER=$(awk '{print}' /etc/llver)
#echo -e "Welcome to $LLVER ${USER}"
#echo " "
#date "+%A %d %B %Y, %T"
#free -m | awk 'NR==2{printf "Memory Usage: %s/%sMB (%.2f%%)\n", $3,$2,$3*100/$2 }'
#df -h | awk '$NF=="/"{printf "Disk Usage: %d/%dGB (%s)\n", $3,$2,$5}'
#echo "Support - https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/ (Right click, Open Link)"
#echo " "