Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey confronted a “news truck full of reporters” from ABC News over the network’s coverage of his company. He could not get them to acknowledge wrongdoing.
Luckey also published several posts disputing the story.
The report tied two of President Donald Trump’s sons to a government defense-spending project, and it set off a chain of events that now reaches the Federal Communications Commission.
ABC News published the original version on Wednesday. The network later took it down with little explanation, and the story had already spread across social media by then.
On Friday night, ABC restored a revised version. The network attached a correction to it.
The correction states that the original “contained errors in the description of certain company investments, government contracts and event chronologies.”
According to a letter from Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio, the original report said Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump “had secured more than $6 billion in active or promised government contracts.”
The report pointed to an investment in Anduril Industries by 1789 Capital, a firm linked to Trump Jr. President Trump has announced that Anduril will receive a $6.6 billion contract to “create a state-of-the-art shipyard in Maryland.”
Moreno sent his letter Saturday to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. He called on the commission to investigate.
“You would expect such a comically botched cover-up in Soviet Russia, not the United States of America,” Moreno wrote.
The senator described the original report as “false, inflammatory, and deliberately malicious.”
Moreno singled out one portion of the story. He said the claim that Trump’s sons were major investors in Anduril, or influenced its investment decisions, was an outright lie.
“ABC News’s hit piece appears to have been nothing more than pure propaganda designed to disparage the Trump family and poison public perception of Anduril Industries,” Moreno wrote to Carr.
Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet also weighed in on X. He accused the network of applying a double standard on accountability.
“If a so-called news organization refuses to retract and notate erroneous, inaccurate reporting that could significantly damage the lives and reputation of the subjects of said reporting, are they even a news org?” Kolvet wrote.
The dispute adds to a history between ABC and the president. In December 2024, after Trump won reelection, ABC paid $15 million to settle a lawsuit he filed in 2024.
The money was earmarked for his presidential library fund.
That lawsuit centered on remarks by ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos, a former campaign surrogate for Bill Clinton.
Stephanopoulos claimed Trump had been convicted of rape in the trial brought by E. Jean Carroll.
A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of assault in that case. Under New York law, assault carries a much lower evidentiary threshold than rape.
Carroll filed suit over claims about an encounter decades ago in a department-store dressing room.
The New York legislature had passed a temporary pause on its statute of limitations to allow her to file.
Moreno’s letter now sits with Carr, whose commission oversees broadcast licensing.
It asks the agency that regulates ABC’s stations to examine how the network handled the report and its removal.
