ABC News scrubbed a story alleging Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump steered billions in Pentagon contracts to Anduril Industries, a claim the company’s founder calls totally bogus.
Less than 24 hours after it went live, the network’s report vanished. The link now lands on a bare error page that reads “Oops! Page unavailable.”
The Washington Free Beacon reported that ABC published the piece on Wednesday under the headline “Trump sons’ investments have won billions in Pentagon contracts since his election,” then pulled both the article and its related post on X. No editor’s note. No correction. No on-the-record explanation.
The deleted story asserted that Anduril Industries, the defense firm founded by Palmer Luckey, had landed roughly $6 billion in federal contracts after 1789 Capital, the firm tied to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, took a stake. It also pointed to a $6.6 billion arrangement for Anduril to build a Navy facility in Baltimore, a project President Donald Trump had highlighted during a visit to the historic shipyard earlier in the week.
Luckey did not say much about the reporting.
Anduril’s founder told critics the piece was false on the core numbers and the supposed pay-to-play link. He said 1789 Capital’s position was a $50 million stake, about one-tenth of one percent, and that the eye-catching dollar figures were not the tidy corruption story ABC sold.
"totally bogus"
Luckey said the network was “refusing to correct this lie.” On the $6.6 billion figure, he was just as blunt.
"is also a lie."
He argued the amounts ABC treated as locked-in awards were hypothetical ceilings that were not likely to become the final payout. And he framed the silence after the takedown as self-protection.
"Admitting they got this wrong would make a legal judgement against them trivially easy. And so they lie,"
1789 Capital pushed back on a separate error in the reporting. Spokesperson Alexa Henning said the ABC writer conflated the firm’s fundraising with an actual investment in Anduril, two different things the story blurred together. Donald Trump Jr. put the outcome in plain terms: ABC deleted the article in less than 24 hours because it was false.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom seized on the ABC piece and blasted it out on X. His posts drew about 900,000 views. He wrote that “The American people were fleeced,” and added, “Accountability is coming.”
Then the underlying story disappeared, along with ABC’s own promotional post that Newsom had shared. The governor still got the viral hit. The network left readers with a 404 page.
That pattern will look familiar to readers who have watched big outlets rush a Trump-family narrative, then retreat when the sourcing buckles, much like a major network walk-back on a false Trump voting claim after the damage was already done.
ABC reporter Nathan Lee, listed on the deleted story, joined the network in January as a David Kaplan Memorial Fellow in the Washington bureau, a program run with the University of Missouri. Asked about the piece, Lee said only, “No comment.” ABC News did not respond to questions about why the article was erased.
Lee’s employment status after the takedown remained unclear. The public record the network left behind was the error page, not a sober accounting of what it got wrong.
The quiet deletion lands against a longer stretch of conflict between the Trump orbit and Disney-owned ABC. In 2024, Trump sued the network after George Stephanopoulos repeatedly claimed on air that Trump had been convicted of raping E. Jean Carroll. Trump was not convicted of rape in that civil case. ABC later settled, paying $15 million to the Trump Presidential Library and $1 million toward legal expenses, with an on-air apology tied to the dispute.
Separate friction has followed the network into the current term. The administration has been locked in a legal fight with ABC and Disney over an FCC inquiry into hiring practices. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has also flagged equal-time concerns around ABC’s The View. In September 2024, ABC briefly suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after remarks about Trump supporters and the killing of Charlie Kirk.
None of that history, on its own, proves why this Anduril story was yanked. It does show a network already operating under legal and regulatory pressure, and still willing to publish a high-stakes claim about the president’s sons and a defense contractor before it could defend the copy for a full day. Longtime critics of the network’s slant will see a straight line to moments when even insiders have conceded ABC’s left-leaning culture after years inside the building.
Anduril builds autonomous drone systems and other defense technology. Luckey, who also founded Oculus VR, said his company had given the reporter data on the size of the 1789 Capital stake. In his telling, the facts were available. The finished ABC frame ignored them.
Defense reporting often trips on a basic distinction: a contract ceiling is not a guarantee of final spending. Luckey’s rebuttal turned on that gap. ABC’s deleted piece treated large headline numbers as proof that a small Trump-linked stake had unlocked a windfall. Luckey called that storyline false and said the $6.6 billion figure did not mean what the article implied.
If a newsroom confuses a ceiling with money already won, and confuses fund-raising with a completed investment, the corruption narrative drafts itself. Cleaning it up after the governor of California has already pumped it to nearly a million views is a lot harder than getting the terms right the first time.
Readers hunting for how political coverage gets tilted, buried, or memory-holed have seen parallel fights over curation and access, from platforms burying negative political stories to courtroom battles over which outlets keep White House credentials.
Here the mechanism was simpler. Publish. Amplify. Delete. Offer no comment.
The Free Beacon’s account and the network’s empty error page leave several questions open. ABC has not issued a public correction explaining which claims failed. Primary contract documents that would show obligated dollars versus ceiling amounts were not laid out in the surviving coverage. Full side-by-side documentation of 1789 Capital’s stake, beyond Luckey’s $50 million and roughly 0.1 percent description, was not released by the network either.
What is not open to debate is the sequence. A story alleging that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump’s firm helped steer billions to Anduril went up. California’s Democratic governor weaponized it. The company and the Trump side called it false. The page came down in under a day. The reporter and the network refused to explain themselves on the record.
Press fights in the Trump era cut both ways, including cases where a federal judge ordered credentials restored for outlets locked out of the White House. Accountability is supposed to run in every direction, including toward newsrooms that publish first and disappear the evidence later.
A network that cannot stand behind a Trump-family “bombshell” for 24 hours is not exposing a secret deal. It is exposing its own standards.