Last week, ABC News published a damning story about the Trump family’s investments in defense companies. And then it disappeared.
Donald Trump Jr. had a theory about why. “ABC deleted this article in less than 24 hours because it’s false,” he wrote on X, responding to Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who had shared it. “Sounds about as long as your presidential campaign would last.” Sinclair’s national desk turned the deletion into a story of its own, and you can still read it on WJLA, Sinclair’s ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C., under the headline “ABC deletes report on Trump sons’ investment ties to companies with $6B in DOD contracts.” Nobody’s touched it since Thursday afternoon.
And while it’s true that the story was taken down (and we’ll get to that in a moment), it’s since been republished. There’s a new headline, the reporter’s name is gone from the byline, and there’s a vaguely worded correction at the top of the article that doesn’t exactly explain what was wrong with the original. So what happened?