Mysterious stuff this morning.
A story published on the ABC News site has disappeared.
It was all about Don Jr. and Eric Trump making six billion dollars from Pentagon contracts.
Now when you click on it, a 404 error message comes up. It still exists in its entirety on internetarchive.org.
Luckily, the story was summarized on a site called commondreams.org.
Where is the story? Why was it removed? Will it return? It was bylined Nathan Lee, whose Twitter account has subsequently vanished.
Common Dreams summarized:
The most recent example came earlier this week, when President Donald Trump announced a multibillion-dollar funding agreement with AI defense firm Anduril Industries, more than a year after 1789 Capital claimed a $2.5 billion stake in the company.
The ABC report also pointed to Florida-based drone parts manufacturer Unusual Machines securing a deal to supply motors for the US Army last year, mere months after the company named Trump Jr. as an adviser.
Drone company Powerus, which lists both Trump sons as investors, won a purchase order from the US Air Force earlier this year for an undisclosed amount.
Neither Unusual Machines nor Powerus had previously received government contracts prior to getting investments from the Trump brothers.
Vulcan Elements, a rare earths magnet startup that has received funding from 1789 Capital, last year received a $620 million loan from the Pentagon.
Foundation Future Industries, a robotics startup that named Eric Trump as its chief strategy adviser, was awarded a $24 million Pentagon contract in April. Shortly after the deal was announced, the Trump son boasted to Fox Business that it would help the US “win” the race with China to build battle-ready robots.
A spokesperson for the Trump brothers told ABC that they “are experienced business leaders who have built and invested in businesses across a wide range of industries for decades, long before their father first ran for public office.”
“Their investment decisions are based solely on their independent business judgment and personal convictions,” the spokesperson said, “and they do not seek to influence, direct, or participate in any government decision, procurement, award, regulatory action, or other governmental process. Attempts to portray their ordinary investment activities as improper are a deliberate distortion of the facts.”
Critics of the Trump family, however, were quick to accuse the two Trump brothers of engaging in unprecedented corruption.
“Donald Trump and his sons have raked in BILLIONS while Americans struggle to make ends meet,” wrote the social media account for Democrats in the US House of Representatives. “Let’s call this what it is: blatant corruption and an abuse of power.”
Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, said congressional Democrats should use the power of the purse to defund the Trump family’s self-dealing.
“Corruption of this kind is why the Democrats need to freeze or cut back US defense spending if they take control of Congress,” O’Brien wrote in a social media post. “If you actually care about US security, funding this is destructive.”
Mark Jacob, former metro editor at the Chicago Tribune, wrote that Pentagon contracts for the Trump-linked firms were “not a coincidence” but “deep corruption that never would have been tolerated before a convicted felon took over the White House.”
Sarah Longwell, a former Republican pollster who left the party over its embrace of Trump, said the deals show that “the president of the United States and his family are insanely, unprecedentedly corrupt.”
