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Fox is deeply enmeshed in potential corruption investigations surrounding the Trump family and Pentagon contracts
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 11/06/26
Fox News has spent the last two years concealing from their viewers the miasma of corruption surrounding President Donald Trump. Now that Democrats have taken control of the House and Senate and are pledging investigations, some at the network are speaking out in defense of the Trump family’s self-dealing business interests — and in so doing, exposing Fox’s own role in the scheme.
Co-host Brian Brenberg suggested on Thursday’s edition of Fox Business’ Money in the Morning that Democrats probing Pentagon contracts with drone makers would “jeopardize national defense” in order to “go after Trump family.” He added, “If you're trying to score political points with the secretary of war, you are not thinking about military readiness, if you’re Democrats, and that is their big flaw in my view.”
Likewise, after co-host Dana Perino suggested on Thursday’s edition of The Five that Democratic investigations would “burn up a lot of time” that could be spent “moving legislation,” her colleague Jesse Watters responded by contrasting Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump favorably with former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. “I mean at least the Trump boys are doing things with minerals and drones and real estate,” Watters claimed. “I mean, they actually create value.”
The potential probes Brenberg and Watters criticized would inevitably hang a lantern on Fox’s incestuous relationship with the Trumps and the Trump administration. One of Fox's own contributors — Powerus founder Brett Velicovich — is president of a drone company Trump’s eldest sons are invested in that received Pentagon contracts, and the defense secretary that oversees the Pentagon is former Fox host Pete Hegseth.
Powerus is “a new drone company backed financially, in part, by Trump’s eldest sons” that “emerged from a crowded field to snap up multimillion-dollar contracts in the U.S. and overseas” including “a $90 million Air Force contract,” as Fox’s corporate cousins at The Wall Street Journal detailed in a profile of the firm published last week.
The Journal detailed that a defense firm backed by a president’s family members receiving government contracts is unprecedented:
A fund backed by the Trump sons, American Ventures, has cashed out at least $6 million from its investment to date. The fund owns about 3.4% of Powerus, according to a securities filing, and holds warrants that can convert to tens of millions of additional shares in the future.
Dominari Holdings, the financial firm behind American Ventures, helped take Powerus public. The Trump sons each own around 6% of the investment bank, which often merges underperforming publicly traded companies with businesses in buzzy industries.
To ethics experts, Powerus is an example of the blurred lines of government and private business in the second Trump administration that are without modern comparison. “Never have we seen a president’s family benefiting from military contracts,” said Richard Painter, a White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush.
The Journal further reported that Trump had posted praise of Velicovich on social media shortly after one of the Fox contributor’s appearances on the network last summer, an example of what I’ve termed the Fox-Trump feedback loop.
Powerus is part of a “a portfolio of defense technology start-ups” Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have invested in “that are benefiting from new Pentagon priorities and spending, further entangling the United States’ interests and the Trump family’s financial fortunes in an area with immense stakes for national security,” The Washington Post reported in July. Earlier this year, then-Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo congratulated Eric on air after one of those companies landed a robotics contract from the Pentagon.
Donald Trump Jr. helped secure the Pentagon leadership that is now rewarding the companies in which he and his brother have invested. He reportedly played a key role in ensuring Hegseth’s confirmation as defense secretary, helping to orchestrate a right-wing campaign to cement the necessary Republican Senate votes following weeks of disturbing reports about the wildly unqualified Fox host’s competence and character. The president’s son subsequently claimed on his podcast that he had been “assisting” Hegseth “with personnel decisions” and prioritizing “candidates who wanted to spend more money on drones,” the Post reported.
The drone deals are just one of a vast array of shady business deals involving the president and his family which could come under scrutiny in the months ahead.
Fox hosts spent years trumpeting House Republican probes of Hunter Biden’s business interests that dealt with a tiny fraction of the money implicated in the Trump family scandals and which were never successfully linked to any decision Joe Biden made in government.
But once Trump returned to the White House and his sons began using the network’s “Biden Crime Family” conspiracy theory as a business plan, Fox’s reporters and pundits either turned their backs on the subject— or openly moved to cash in.
And now that Democrats are promising to investigate the corruption these pundits ignored, Fox personalities are denouncing the probes as a “witch hunt” (Greg Gutfeld), “ruthless upcoming lawfare campaign” (Sean Hannity), a “weaponization routine” (Dan Bongino), and a “revenge agenda” (Donald Trump Jr.’s business partner Laura Ingraham).
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