ABC News published a story tying Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump to billions in defense work, but shortly thereafter removed the story completely from its site.
Anduril founder Palmer Luckey said the network had the investment wrong by billions and the contract total wrong, as well.
The story, by Nathan Lee, went up around Tuesday’s announcement of a $6.6 billion Anduril project tied to submarine work in Baltimore County.
An archived copy quoted by RedState said the Navy would support $2.9 billion of that cost for a plant to make parts for Virginia-class submarines, and that Anduril would invest $3.7 billion in a yard Trump called Arsenal-2.
The piece then turned to 1789 Capital, a firm that lists Donald Trump Jr. as one of six partners.
Lee, who identifies himself on LinkedIn as a journalism student at the University of Missouri working in ABC’s Washington, D.C. bureau, wrote that the firm “claimed a major stake in Anduril in June 2025 from a $2.5 billion investment into the company.”
It said Anduril had since received about $1.8 billion on 135 other government agreements, and that an ABC analysis found defense companies “backed by the president’s sons,” including Anduril, had “raked in more than $6 billion” in active or promised contracts since those investments.
Should ABC News face accountability for publishing false information about the Trump family?
Yes, they must correct their mistake
100% (15 votes)
No, it’s just a minor error
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The story noted a May letter from Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, and Rep. Robert Garcia asked the Pentagon inspector general to investigate.
The live URL to the ABC story now returns an error message saying the page is “unavailable.”
RedState said a search of ABC’s sites turned up no correction or retraction.
Luckey answered before the page came down. He quoted the “major stake” sentence and wrote, “This is not true. You are lying. Please correct your lies.”
In a follow-up, he said Anduril had given Lee the figures: 1789 Capital had invested $50 million in Anduril, “about 1/1000th of the company,” not a major stake taken out of a $2.5 billion round. The gap between those two numbers is $2.45 billion.
Nathan Lee has deleted his post and has not commented.
“1789 Capital — a venture capital firm that lists Donald Trump Jr. as one of six partners along with three founders — claimed a major stake in Anduril in June 2025 from a $2.5 billion investment into the company.”
This is not true. You are lying. Please correct your lies.
— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) October 7, 2026
He also rejected the contract claim. “The claim of $6B+ in ‘active or promised government contracts’ is also a lie,” he wrote. Most of that sum, he said, was “hypothetical contract ceilings, which are (by design) larger than the government or the contractor expect to transact.”
He said ABC was refusing to correct the story because people, including the governor, had acted on it, and that admitting the error would make a judgment against the network easy.
@ABC is refusing to correct this lie. @ByNathanLee’s “analysis” is totally bogus, and he knows it, because Anduril provided him with the actual numbers – 1789 Capital has only invested a total of $50M in Anduril, and this so-called “major stake” is about 1/1000th of the company.
The claim of $6B+ in “active or promised government contracts” is also a lie. Most of that amount is in hypothetical contract ceilings, which are (by design) larger than the government or the contractor expect to transact.
The problem for Nathan and ABC, which they also know, is that a bunch of people, including the Governor, assumed they were telling the truth and acted on it. Admitting they got this wrong would make a legal judgement against them trivially easy. And so they lie.
— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) October 7, 2026
Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for 1789 Capital, made the same distinction.
“This post shows you have literally zero financial literacy,” she said in a remark directed at the ABC reporter.
“1789 Capital does not have a ‘major stake’ in Anduril,” Henning wrote in a post on X. “It’s false to say Vulcan, Firehawk, and PsiQuantum are ‘backed by Don Jr and Eric Trump.’”
“Here’s a small lesson, that I also explained to ABC, Henning continued in her post. “The ‘reporter’ who is a complete idiot conflated raising funds with investment by 1789. Those are two separate actions. Meaning the ‘investments’ mentioned were actually the total number raised for a funding round, that MANY companies contribute to.”
She also said many of the companies had won contracts under former President Joe Biden as well as Trump. Anduril’s own awards, ABC’s story noted, go back to 2019.
This is not ABC’s first expensive miss on Trump. In December 2024, the network agreed to pay $15 million to a presidential foundation and museum, plus $1 million in legal fees, to settle his defamation suit against the network and commentator George Stephanopoulos, who asserted that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” A New York jury in the E. Jean Carroll case found him liable for sexual abuse, a different claim under that state’s law.
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