'Oops! Page Unavailable': ABC News Mysteriously Spikes Article Alleging Trump Admin Awarded Billions to Palmer Luckey's Anduril Because of Ties to Don Jr., Eric

ABC News has quietly deleted a story it published this week alleging the Pentagon awarded billions of dollars in contracts to Anduril Industries—founded by the tech billionaire Palmer Luckey—because Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric Trump allegedly hold a sizable stake in the defense contractor.

The Disney-owned outlet published the story on Wednesday, titled "Trump sons' investments have won billions in Pentagon contracts since his election," that asserted Anduril, which makes autonomous drone systems, has landed $6 billion in federal contracts since the Trump sons' 1789 Capital firm took out a stake in the defense company. The latest score, according to ABC News, was through a $6.6 billion contract for Anduril to build a Navy facility in Baltimore, which President Donald Trump himself rolled out earlier this week during a visit to the historic shipyard.

The story sparked a widespread outcry from the anti-Trump resistance, which has made the Trump family's business interests a major issue in the midterms. California governor Gavin Newsom (D.) blasted out the story on X, garnering 900,000 views.

"The American people were fleeced," wrote Newsom, who shares an ex-partner, Kimberly Guilfoyle, with Donald Trump Jr. "Accountability is coming."

But ABC News mysteriously pulled the story—and the X post that Newsom retweeted—less than 24 hours after publication. The link for the article now redirects to a "404" page, which states, "Oops! Page unavailable." The wholesale deletion of a news article is unusual for a prominent outlet like ABC News. News organizations typically add corrections, clarifications, or editor's notes to disputed news stories rather than completely removing them without explanation. In the rare scenario in which an article is taken down entirely, there is almost always an editor's note released explaining the removal.

It comes after Luckey called the ABC story "totally bogus" and accused the outlet of "refusing to correct this lie."

Luckey, who is also the founder of Oculus VR, a virtual realty company, said Anduril provided the reporter, Nathan Lee, with data that showed the Trump firm, 1789 Capital, had only a $50 million stake in Anduril, or around 0.1 percent of the company. Luckey said the allegation that the Pentagon established $6.6 billion in contracts with Anduril "is also a lie." He said those amounts are for "hypothetical contract ceilings" and are unlikely to be what the Pentagon ultimately pays Anduril.

"Admitting they got this wrong would make a legal judgement against them trivially easy. And so they lie," said Luckey, who has long denounced the media for liberal bias.

ABC News did not respond to requests for comment. Lee, who joined ABC News in January, said, "No comment."

The story does not appear to have been broadcast on television, which suggests it might not have undergone high-level review at ABC News, where the digital operation—whose audience figures have long lagged those of its TV news competitors—is seen as downstream of the legacy broadcast programs. Lee is an early career journalist who is a David Kaplan Memorial Fellow in ABC's Washington, D.C., bureau. The program, named for an ABC News producer who was killed by a sniper while on assignment in Sarajevo in 1992, is administered by the University of Missouri and provides a semester of paid work at ABC News. Lee's current employment status is unclear.

The unexplained deletion marks the latest Trump-related embarrassment for ABC News. Trump sued the network in 2024 after George Stephanopoulos, a former Bill Clinton aide who anchors the Sunday talk show This Week, claimed falsely and repeatedly that the president had been convicted of raping former journalist E. Jean Carroll. Trump was never convicted of rape in the case. Instead, a jury awarded damages for sexual abuse to Carroll in a civil lawsuit against Trump.

ABC News agreed to settle the lawsuit, paying the Trump Presidential Library $15 million and $1 million to cover Trump's legal expenses in addition to having Stephanopoulos apologize on-air.

And the administration is locked in a high-stakes lawsuit with ABC and Disney over a Federal Communications Commission investigation into the network's hiring practices. Disney claims the investigation is retaliation for negative statements that late-night ABC talk host Jimmy Kimmel has made over the years about Trump and his allies. ABC suspended Kimmel for a few days in September 2024 after he suggested that Trump supporters were involved in the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

ABC News has also been under pressure from the FCC over its daytime program The View, which focuses heavily on politics and is overwhelmingly hostile to Trump and conservatives. FCC chairman Brendan Carr has suggested that The View could be in violation of FCC regulations regarding equal time.

The post 'Oops! Page Unavailable': ABC News Mysteriously Spikes Article Alleging Trump Admin Awarded Billions to Palmer Luckey's Anduril Because of Ties to Don Jr., Eric appeared first on .