ABC releases updated version of smear attack on Trump’s sons amid heavy criticism

The ensuing fallout from the report, which spread on social media prior to its removal, fueled speculation that it may put the embattled news outlet into more legal jeopardy for potentially libelous claims.

Republican Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno said Saturday that he was calling for an investigation in a letter to Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr.

“You would expect such a comically botched cover-up in Soviet Russia, not the United States of America,” Moreno said in the letter to Carr.

He referred to the report as “false, inflammatory, and deliberately malicious,” which would check several of the boxes needed to press a libel lawsuit.

ABC News notably was forced to settle a 2024 lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump after anchor George Stephanopoulos — a former campaign surrogate for Bill Clinton — falsely claimed that Trump had been convicted of rape in the trial brought by serial accuser E. Jean Carroll.

A stacked Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of assault, which requires a much lower evidentiary threshold under New York law, after the state legislature passed a temporary pause on its statute of limitations in order to allow Carroll to file suit over claims of a decades-old tryst with Trump in a department-store dressing room.

ABC’s $15 million settlement in December 2024, following Trump’s reelection, was earmarked to go to his presidential library fund.

In its original story published on Wednesday, ABC News claimed that two of Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, “had secured more than $6 billion in active or promised government contracts,” Moreno said in his letter.

The report cited an investment by the Don Jr.-linked 1789 Capital in Anduril Industries, which President Trump did indeed announce would receive a $6.6 billion contract to “create a state-of-the-art shipyard in Maryland.”

But as ABC News noted in a correction to its amended report, the initial one “contained errors in the description of certain company investments, government contracts and event chronologies.”

Moreno said the part implicating Trump’s sons as major investors or influencers in Anduril’s 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,” he wrote in his letter to Carr.

Others also criticized the news outlet, including Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet, who noted a double standard in 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?” he wrote on X.

Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey issued several posts actively calling out the false report. He even confronted a “news truck full of reporters” from the network but was unable to get them to acknowledge wrongdoing.