Ohio Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr calling for a formal investigation into ABC News over a report the network published and then quietly deleted regarding the Trump family's business investments with defense technology firm Anduril Industries. In the letter, Moreno described the story as a "political hit job" and demanded to know who approved its publication and whether the network violated its obligations as a licensed broadcaster.
"Thus, I urge the Commission to open a formal investigation into ABC News's political hit job. 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," Moreno wrote to Carr, according to reporting on the letter.
Moreno's demand followed ABC's removal of the story, which was published October 7 and alleged that 1789 Capital — the venture firm where Donald Trump Jr. serves as a partner — had secured billions in Pentagon contracts through a "major stake" in Anduril. The report claimed 1789 Capital acquired that stake through a $2.5 billion investment. That figure, according to reporting on the matter, actually represented Anduril's broader fundraising round, while 1789 Capital's investment was approximately $50 million. ABC has offered no explanation for the takedown.
The episode drew criticism from across the media spectrum. Anduril founder Palmer Luckey called the story "totally bogus," and even mainstream media figures questioned the network's judgment in publishing it. The controversy carried direct stakes for Moreno's home state: in January, Anduril announced it is pouring nearly one billion dollars into Ohio's economy by building a five-million-square-foot production facility to manufacture Barracuda-500 drones, work that is already underway.
The complaint against ABC is not the first of its kind. Disney and ABC News paid fifteen million dollars, plus another million in legal fees, in 2024 after President Trump filed a defamation suit over anchor and former Bill Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos' repeated on-air allegations that Trump had been found "liable for rape" in the E. Jean Carroll civil cases — an assertion that is categorically false.
Coverage of Moreno's letter spread across conservative outlets within hours, with RedState carrying the headline "ABC's Faceplant Blows Up: Moreno Calls for Investigation Into Anti-Trump 'Political Hit Job,'" and other outlets reporting that the senator urged the FCC to probe the network over a retracted story linking Donald Trump Jr. and Anduril to government contracts. OANN also carried the senator's call, noting that ABC had since deleted the report and that Moreno characterized the story as designed to damage the Trump administration and the president's family.
"Ohio GOP Senator Bernie Moreno is calling for an investigation into ABC," OANN reported. The network said Moreno "sent a letter to the FCC demanding an immediate investigation into the news outlet for their publication of a false and deliberately malicious report concerning the Trump family's business investments with defense tech firm Anduril," and that the senator "called the report a political hit job, designed to damage the Trump administration and the president's family, adding ABC must be held accountable."
Separately, Infowars amplified a different aspect of the political moment, with a post declaring "HISTORIC UKRAINE BOMBSHELL" and claiming that President Trump had called for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to step down. In the accompanying broadcast, host Alex Jones told viewers that "Trump's statement a few hours ago" called for "the removal of the Ukrainian NATO puppet Zelensky from power because he sabotaged every major peace deal."
Jones described the development as vindication of his long-running criticisms of NATO's role in the conflict. "This has all been a project of NATO to push up the Russians' borders and push them into war," Jones said. He went on to claim that "in the last four and a half years of this war, NATO has lost," pointing to European conscription efforts and claiming that a German call-up of three hundred thousand people drew only five hundred volunteers. He further stated that Trump is "now saying he's going to cut off intelligence" to Ukraine, a step Jones framed as "directing all the weapons that Ukraine rains down on Russia."
Jones said he had predicted the turn the previous evening, telling his audience that after Zelensky "blew up all these Russian refineries after Trump made a deal to ship diesel to the US and Europe, the honeymoon's over," and that "Trump was about to come out against Zelensky." He also pushed back against critics who had accused him of being a Russian agent for praising Trump's move, arguing that those same critics "didn't respond to Trump though" — that they attacked him rather than the president.
"So put pressure on Trump. You get results," Jones said, adding that he criticized the president when he disagreed with him, including on gun policy, while supporting him when he agreed. "Don't be a cult. Don't just follow whatever Trump's doing at the moment if it wasn't we elected him for."
Jones closed by warning that the forces opposing the shift would not go quietly. "But NATO and the globalists in Zelensky are going to pull a rabbit out of a hat. They're going to pull a major false flag. Make no mistake about that," he said.
Next News Network could not independently verify the claims regarding ABC's report, the nature of 1789 Capital's investment in Anduril, or the alleged Trump statement on Zelensky. The assertion that Trump called for Zelensky's removal rests on Jones' broadcast and the Infowars post promoting it; no independently confirmed documentation of such a statement was available.
Our Take
Moreno's letter is a model of the kind of accountability the legacy press has avoided for years. ABC quietly deleted a story that accused the president's son of profiting off Pentagon contracts worth billions — a story that crumbled the moment the actual numbers surfaced. The corrected figure, fifty million dollars rather than two and a half billion, is not a rounding error; it is the difference between a scandal and a smear. And the network has offered no explanation at all, which is the tell. When a broadcaster retracts and goes silent, the public deserves a formal review of who wrote it, who approved it, and what pressure campaign produced it. The FCC should grant Moreno's request. As for the Ukraine story, the pattern is familiar: the establishment's foreign policy apparatus has spent years telling Americans that the war is existential and that dissent is treason. If the president is indeed moving to cut off the intelligence and weapons that fuel a proxy war with a nuclear power, he is doing what he was elected to do — and the same people who called that policy treason will call it sabotage. They always do.
