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ABC News ran a Trump sons Pentagon story, then deleted it within 24 hours

ABC News Pulled Its Trump Sons Pentagon Story Within 24 Hours After Anduril’s Founder Called It a Lie

by
M.A. Rothman

By M.A. RothmanOctober 9, 2026 · 4 min read
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ABC News took down its own story claiming that investments tied to President Trump’s sons had won billions in Pentagon contracts, less than 24 hours after publishing it. As of Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026, the link led to a page reading “Oops! Page unavailable,” with no correction, no editor’s note and no explanation, according to the Washington Free Beacon and the Daily Wire.

The story had already done its damage. California Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed it out on X to an audience the Free Beacon put at 900,000 views. And Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, whose company was at the center of it, had spent the previous day publicly calling it a lie.

What ABC published

The article, published Wednesday, Oct. 7, ran under the headline “Trump sons’ investments have won billions in Pentagon contracts since his election.” It opened with the $6.6 billion shipyard project President Trump announced on Oct. 6 at Sparrows Point in Baltimore County, Maryland, where Anduril Industries plans to build components for Virginia-class submarines, and called it “the most recent government funding agreement into a company with investment ties to the president’s sons.”

The key claim was about 1789 Capital, the venture firm that lists Donald Trump Jr. as a partner. According to an archived copy of the story, ABC wrote that the firm “claimed a major stake in Anduril in June 2025 from a $2.5 billion investment into the company.” An “ABC News analysis,” the story said, found that defense companies backed by the president’s sons had “raked in more than $6 billion dollars in active or promised government contracts since those investments were made.”

Newsom took it from there. “The American people were fleeced,” he wrote, according to the Free Beacon. “Accountability is coming.”

“This is not true. You are lying.”

Luckey answered within hours. Quoting ABC’s sentence about the “major stake” directly, he posted on Oct. 7: “This is not true. You are lying. Please correct your lies.”

A few hours later, he followed up: “@ABC is refusing to correct this lie. @ByNathanLee’s ‘analysis’ is totally bogus, and he knows it, because Anduril provided him with the actual numbers – 1789 Capital has only invested a total of $50M in Anduril, and this so-called ‘major stake’ is about 1/1000th of the company.”

That’s the difference between the story and the facts. A $2.5 billion funding round was a round with many investors. 1789 Capital’s piece of it, by Luckey’s account, was $50 million, about 0.1 percent of Anduril. The Free Beacon also reported Luckey saying that the big contract numbers ABC leaned on were “hypothetical contract ceilings,” not what the Pentagon will actually pay.

He also offered his theory of why ABC wouldn’t just fix it. “Admitting they got this wrong would make a legal judgement against them trivially easy. And so they lie,” he said, as quoted by the Free Beacon.

Gone without a word

Then the story vanished. According to the Free Beacon, ABC pulled both the article and the X post that Newsom had shared, and the original link redirected to the “Oops! Page unavailable” page. ABC did not respond to requests for comment from the Free Beacon or the Daily Wire, and the reporter, Nathan Lee, told the Free Beacon: “No comment.”

That is not how a serious newsroom handles a disputed story. As the Free Beacon noted, news organizations typically add corrections, clarifications or editor’s notes to stories that are challenged, and in the rare case where a story is removed entirely, they almost always explain why. ABC did neither. A spokesperson for Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, quoted in the original story, had already called attempts to portray their investments as improper “a deliberate distortion of the facts.”

The quiet deletion lets ABC avoid admitting anything. But the claim doesn’t disappear with the page. It lives on in screenshots, reposts and the hundreds of thousands of people who saw a sitting governor share it as proof that Americans were “fleeced.” A deletion without a correction reaches none of them.

ABC’s track record

ABC has been here before with this family. In 2024, President Trump sued the network after George Stephanopoulos falsely and repeatedly claimed on air that Trump had been convicted of raping E. Jean Carroll. He was never convicted of rape; a civil jury awarded Carroll damages for sexual abuse. ABC settled by paying $15 million to the Trump presidential library and $1 million toward Trump’s legal fees, and Stephanopoulos apologized on air.

Sixteen million dollars later, the network published a story about the president’s sons even though, by Luckey’s account, the company at its center had already handed the reporter the real numbers. When the pushback came, ABC made it disappear.

ABC ran it, Newsom spread it, and when the man who runs the company at its center called it a lie, ABC made it vanish instead of explaining itself.

Editor’s note: On the evening of Oct. 9, 2026, after this article was published, ABC News posted a rewritten version of the story with a correction stating that the Oct. 7 version “contained errors in the description of certain company investments, government contracts and event chronologies.” The revised story reports that 1789 Capital invested $50 million in Anduril as part of a larger $2.5 billion funding round, which it describes as a relatively small stake.

Sources

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