Yesterday, I wrote about ABC News' appalling lack of candor and news judgment when it published a false story about the Trump sons' investment in Anduril, the up-and-coming defense contractor revolutionizing the industry.
ABC falsely reported an "investigation" that claimed the Trump boys led a billion-dollar investment round in Anduril and have profited handsomely from Trump-approved defense contracts steered to the company. If true, it would imply the Trumps were raiding the Treasury for personal profit.
ABC got just about everything wrong, but it provided a convenient news hook for other media figures and Democrats to blast the Trumps as corrupt, and the Trump administration as using the Department of War's budget as a piggy bank to enrich the president's family.
The story ignited a fire that raged until it...disappeared. Follow the links to the story, and you get a "404, Page Not Found" error that lasted for days. Then, suddenly, the story reappeared out of nowhere with an editor's note vaguely describing revisions, none of which were explained. No "mea culpa," no corrections. Just "we revised this story to correct some undefined facts."
@maxwelltani @semafor Yes, the editor defended it on the phone with me
— Alexa Henning (@alexahenning) October 12, 2026
Because the story was so high-profile and presented as explosive, more than a few people thought its disappearance was like a certain Texas Senate candidate vanishing for unexplained reasons a month from the election. It made no sense.
ABC responded simply: the story was published prematurely, implying it hadn't gone through the fact-checking process and was published by accident.
Unsurprisingly, that's completely false. It's about as sincere as any "legal note" from a haridan on The View, another ABC News product that has a slippery relationship with facts.
When ABC News removed a story about Donald Trump’s sons from its website without explanation on Thursday, an unnamed company source told media reporters the article had been published “prematurely.” Nathan Lee, the investigative reporter who wrote the original piece, used the same language in emails to Powerus and Anduril, two of the companies at the center of the piece.
But emails between ABC News and its subjects, provided to Semafor, show the network seeking to downplay its errors by misrepresenting its own processes.
On Oct. 7, ABC News published an investigation into a new $6.6 billion deal between defense contractor Anduril and the US Navy to build a new high-tech submarine shipyard in Maryland. The piece largely focused on the financial ties between President Donald Trump’s son and defense companies, noting that Donald Trump Jr. is a partner at investment firm 1789 Capital, which “claimed a major stake in Anduril in June 2025 from a $2.5 billion investment into the company.”
After the piece was published, a spokesperson for Anduril reached out to Lee with several urgent requests for correction. The company — which had not responded to ABC News’ inquiries prior to its publication, according to an Anduril source — wanted the network to clarify connections between Anduril and 1789, noting that the firm had invested $50 million in Anduril’s latest round, a small percentage of the $2.5 billion total.
“Today, 1789 owns approximately 0.13% of Anduril and has no major investor rights. Any suggestion that 1789 financed the round or holds significant ownership, governance position or ‘major stake’ in Anduril is inaccurate,” Anduril’s spokesperson wrote to Lee, according to emails obtained by Semafor.
After the story was published on Wednesday, Lee told Anduril that the network was slightly tweaking the language in its piece, but it was otherwise standing by its story.
ABC stood by the story, though it conceded the language was a bit off and said it would clarify it.
That wasn't good enough, so ABC made legal threats, and then pulled off an unusual, unexplained disappearing act, taking the story down for days, presumably for legal vetting. The lawyers must have given the reporters a talking-to, because when the story reappeared, they stripped out all the offending language.
More importantly, they neutered the story of massive corruption into a non-story; what was supposed to be a bombshell became a bland story about a relatively new firm that raised capital, about as common as President Trump eating a Big Mac. Both stories are nothingburgers.
Anduril, you probably know, has burst onto the scene in recent years as a remarkable defense contractor that builds excellent products that are, by defense standards, cheap, effective, and easy to scale. It's the opposite of what you'd expect from the oligopoly that developed in the Defense industry after the end of the Cold War.
Palmer Luckey is another character out of a Heinlein novel. A tech genius who invented the Oculus virtual reality system, he made his fortune selling the tech to Facebook. His politics didn't exactly mesh with the company's prevailing ideology, so they booted him in 2017, and he decided to risk it all by taking on the big defense contractors, whom he saw as too fat, too happy, and too slow to produce the weapons needed to fight on the modern battlefield.
He was right. Everyone knew it, regardless of politics. The Biden administration was just as happy to work with Anduril as the Trump administration because the Department of War could get what it needed better, faster, and cheaper.
So it's no surprise that investors want in on a growing company. It's true that the Trump boys have a stake in an investment firm that put in a relatively small amount of money, but their investment was in the millions, not billions, and the Trumps didn't even have a say in where the money went.
I wish I owned a piece of Anduril. They'll own a big chunk of the defense pie soon enough, and that's a good thing.
That changes the story quite a bit, but ABC tried to stick to their lies until the legal papers flew, and they still haven't actually RETRACTED the lies that sparked the controversy.
“It’s still not clear. I read your text and it reads as if they invested the full $2.5b. Would be much more accurate to list their actual investment of $50m and even more accurate to share that they own less than a percentage point in Anduril,” a spokesperson wrote.
In another email later Wednesday afternoon, Lee said ABC News’ editors had reviewed the language and were standing by the piece.
“Apologies, but my editors said we are standing by the language. I’ll make sure to reach out to both of you directly for any future stories,” Lee said.
But by Thursday, the network had changed its mind. The network removed the piece without explanation, and Peter Charalambous, an ABC News producer in New York, reached out to Anduril and Powerus, a drone contractor mentioned in the story, saying the story had been “published prematurely and removed from our website.”
On Friday evening, ABC News republished a new version of the story re-reported by Charalambous, now without a byline. An editor’s note did not include language that the initial piece was published early.
“Editor’s Note: CORRECTION: A version of this story published on Oct. 7 contained errors in the description of certain company investments, government contracts and event chronologies. After subsequent reporting, this version contains corrected information and additional context regarding some of those investments, contracts and events.”
That, my friends, is not a retraction. It is mush. When you accuse people of something and get it completely wrong, you don't just hand-wave. You apologize and set things right.
Well, you do if you are in the truth business, but ABC News is not. They are in the Narrative™ business, and they got their narrative out there, and almost nobody who saw the original story will ever see the new version, nor will they hear that ABC's accusations were concocted out of thin air.
And ABC wanted to keep the story up! Without the legal threats, they would have stood by the story, and they told Anduril that point-blank. "We are standing by the language."
Until the lawyers made them think twice because they crossed a big red line. They were happy to keep lies out in the public marketplace of ideas until it might cost them real money.
This is not a case of "Everybody gets things wrong sometimes." It's true that none of us is perfect, and we all get things wrong, and often.
But when the accusations are explosive, you double and triple-check. ABC double-checked, stood by the lies, and only backed down when forced to. And they still won't openly admit they were wrong.
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