ABC News claimed Donald Trump Jr.'s firm 1789 Capital held a $2.5 billion stake in defense contractor Anduril Industries. The actual investment was $50 million. That's not a rounding error. That's a 4,900% exaggeration published as fact on a major broadcast network.
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) isn't letting it slide.
Moreno sent a formal request to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on October 10 demanding an investigation into what he called ABC's "political hit job on Anduril & the Trump family." His letter to the Commission didn't mince around the edges: "We must know who signed off on the publication of this false story, who may have asked to profit from the attack, and whether ABC News's conduct violated its obligations as a licensee."
The original ABC story dropped on October 7, alleging that Trump's sons had leveraged their father's presidency to secure Pentagon contracts for Anduril Industries, the defense tech company founded by billionaire Palmer Luckey. The piece inflated 1789 Capital's investment by fifty times its actual size and falsely stated that Trump Jr. serves on the company's investment committee.
Luckey called the story "totally bogus." He would know — it's his company.
ABC's response tells you everything about how seriously they took their own reporting. They didn't issue a correction on air. They didn't run a retraction segment with George Stephanopoulos looking somber into the camera. They quietly deleted the original article, then republished a revised version on October 11 with an editor's note and the most egregious fabrications scrubbed out. No explanation for why the story ran in the first place. No accounting for who sourced the false $2.5 billion figure.
This is the same network that paid Donald Trump $15 million plus $1 million in legal fees to settle the E. Jean Carroll defamation cases. Disney's lawyers know what sloppy journalism costs. Apparently the newsroom didn't get the memo.
Moreno's investigation request carries weight precisely because of where he sits. Anduril announced a nearly $1 billion investment in Ohio back in January — a 5-million-square-foot production facility for Barracuda-500 and Altius 600 drones. A fabricated story tying the company to political corruption doesn't just smear the Trump family. It threatens real jobs and real defense manufacturing in Moreno's state.
The network's defenders will point out that ABC corrected the record. They did — four days later, after the original story had already circulated through every anti-Trump feed on the internet. A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on, and ABC gave this one a four-day head start.
What makes Moreno's letter unusual isn't the anger — politicians write angry letters every week. It's the specific ask. He wants the FCC to determine whether ABC violated its broadcast license obligations. That's not a sternly worded press release. That's a senator telling a regulatory agency to open a formal proceeding against a major network.
ABC ran a story that overstated an investment by $2.45 billion, fabricated a board position, and framed a legitimate defense company as a corruption vehicle. When caught, they deleted the evidence and posted a quieter version hoping nobody would notice.
A senator noticed. The FCC chairman has the letter on his desk.