Eric Trump, a son of President Donald Trump, backed a Republican senator’s demand for a federal investigation of ABC News on Monday, Oct. 12, 2026, over a since-corrected report on his family’s investment ties to the defense contractor Anduril Industries. Whether the Federal Communications Commission will open an investigation is still unclear.
“Thank you @berniemoreno — can’t wait to participate!” Eric Trump wrote on X.
“You can’t publish a bull**** hit-piece, let it spread and go viral, then delete it 24 hours later, under the cover of darkness with no explanation or apology. Who approved it? Has the author been fired? @ABC owes us answers,” he continued on X.
An FCC source told CNN’s Brian Stelter on Monday that Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), had opened an investigation into ABC News. The source said Carr acted on a letter from Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio.
The Senator’s Letter to Carr
Moreno sent his letter to Carr on Saturday, Oct. 10, asking for a formal inquiry into what he characterized as a political hit job. He demanded to know who signed off on the story, who stood to profit from it and whether the network violated its obligations as a licensee. Moreno argued that broadcast licenses are a privilege that carries a public-interest duty.
“You would expect such a comically botched cover-up in Soviet Russia, not the United States of America,” Moreno wrote in the letter, which called the report “false, inflammatory, and deliberately malicious.”
Anduril has its Arsenal-1 manufacturing plant in development in Ohio. The company says the plant represents an investment of nearly $1 billion and more than 4,000 jobs. Moreno said accountability is owed to workers whose jobs were put at risk by the reporting, and he said jobs at a Pickaway County, Ohio, factory are at risk.
What ABC Published, Then Deleted
ABC News published the original article Wednesday, Oct. 7, under the headline “Trump sons’ investments have won billions in Pentagon contracts since his election.” The report said defense companies backed by the president’s sons had taken in more than $6 billion in active or promised government contracts.
The report said 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is one of six partners, had claimed a major stake in Anduril in June 2025 through a $2.5 billion investment. It said Anduril has been awarded 135 other federal contracts since that investment, worth around $1.8 billion. The report also cited a $6.6 billion contract that President Trump announced Tuesday, Oct. 6, under which Anduril would build a state-of-the-art Navy shipyard facility in Baltimore.
The story disappeared less than 24 hours after publication with no public explanation, and the link redirected to an error page. ABC News republished a substantially revised version Friday, Oct. 9, under the headline “New shipyard announced amid earlier Democratic concerns about potential conflicts of interest.” The network replaced the original reporter’s name in the byline with “ABC News.”
An editor’s note acknowledged mistakes in the description of the company investments, the government contracts and the sequence of events. The revised piece put the 1789 Capital investment at roughly $50 million, within a $2.5 billion funding round, and described the position as comparatively small against an Anduril valuation of more than $60 billion. The revised piece said Donald Trump Jr. does not sit on the three-person committee that makes the firm’s investment decisions. Palmer Luckey, the Anduril co-founder who also founded Oculus VR, said the stake amounts to about 0.1 percent of the company.
1789 Capital Weighs Legal Action
Alexa Henning, a 1789 Capital spokeswoman, said on X that the reporter had conflated money raised in a funding round with money her firm actually invested. Henning said nobody from ABC News sought comment from 1789 Capital before the original story was published, and she said she heard from “multiple people inside ABC” privately calling it a “huge mess up.”
Henning told Fox News Digital that the firm is weighing legal action against ABC News. “We still have our attorneys completely plugged into this, and we’re not taking options off the table because they can’t get away with writing completely false things and hit jobs,” she said. She added, “Our lawyers have been in touch with ABC and Disney.”
Henning said of the correction, “ABC has a long history of doing this to the president and his family.”
Henning told the newsletter Status that ABC News senior coordinating producer Justin Fishel defended the reporting to her before the network pulled it. A report on Sunday, Oct. 11, said ABC editors initially stood by the story, citing emails between reporter Nathan Lee and an Anduril spokesperson, contradicting the network’s explanation to media reporters that the piece was published “prematurely.” ABC News producer Peter Charalambous wrote in emails to Anduril and the drone contractor Powerus that the story was “published prematurely and removed from our website.”
Lee, an investigative reporter, wrote the original piece. He joined ABC News in January 2026 as a David Kaplan Memorial Fellow in the Washington, D.C., bureau. His employment status is unclear. The story does not appear to have aired on television.
The report traveled widely before the deletion. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, shared it on X in a widely viewed post. Donald Trump Jr. replied that the network had taken the article down within a day because it was false.
Latest Fight With the Network
The dispute is the latest fight between the Trump family and the network. ABC News settled President Trump’s defamation lawsuit in December 2024, paying $15 million to his presidential library plus $1 million in legal fees and posting a statement of regret over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ on-air claims about the E. Jean Carroll case.
The FCC in April 2026 ordered all eight ABC-owned television stations to file for license renewal well ahead of schedule, a step described as unusual. Disney, ABC’s parent company, sued in August to block that review, characterizing it as part of a retaliatory campaign against the network. The commission has said the early renewal grew out of its investigation into Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Disney’s lawyers accused the administration of censorship at a court hearing Oct. 6, and the FCC defended the review as a regulatory action. FCC guidance says the commission has narrow authority over complaints about news accuracy or bias, and federal law bars censorship or interference with press freedoms.
