ABC News paid $16 million to settle a defamation lawsuit Trump filed against them.
That check didn't come from nowhere.
It came from a decade of running a covert war against one man — and Billy Bush just named the operation.
Billy Bush Reveals ABC News Had a 75-Person Division to Destroy Trump in 2016
Billy Bush was the guy on the bus in 2005.
He held the hot mic, he heard the conversation, and NBC torched him when they decided that old footage was more valuable as a political weapon than as tape they'd agreed to keep off the record.
So when he sat down on Sean Hannity's podcast and said this, pay attention.
"ABC News had a division," Bush said. "They had a division dedicated with 75 people in it — because I knew the guy who ran the division, which was dedicated to basically getting him."
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Not a reporter with a grudge.
Not a producer who didn't like Trump's politics.
A division of 75 people whose entire job was to destroy one presidential candidate before Election Day.
Bush then described confronting then-NBC News chairman Andy Lack directly — telling him it was wrong to weaponize a green room conversation that was never meant to air.
It didn't matter.
The tape dropped two days before the second presidential debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton, and the very first question out of Anderson Cooper's mouth was about that tape.
"There has always been an 'it' to get Trump," Bush said. "But this was definitely it at the time."
Brian Ross and the Fake Flynn Report That Crashed the Stock Market
In December 2017, ABC's chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross went live with a bombshell: Michael Flynn was ready to testify that Trump ordered him to contact the Russians during the campaign.
The Dow Jones fell more than 350 points within minutes.
The story was false.
Ross had the key fact wrong — Flynn's Russian contacts happened after Trump became president-elect, not while he was a candidate.
The difference was everything.
One scenario implied criminal conspiracy.
The other was routine transition business every incoming administration conducts.
ABC first tried calling it a "clarification."
After the country erupted, they called it what it was: a retraction.
Ross was suspended without pay, permanently banned from covering Trump, and eventually pushed out of the network entirely.
The ABC News president told his staff on a leaked internal call that he had never in his career felt more "rage, disappointment and frustration."
Then in December 2024, This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos went on air and told his audience that Trump had been "found liable for rape" in the E. Jean Carroll case.
A civil jury found Trump liable for "sexual abuse" — a distinction Stephanopoulos understood perfectly and ignored anyway.
ABC paid Trump $16 million.
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Last year, correspondent Terry Moran was fired for attacking Trump and Stephen Miller on social media.
Three separate people, three separate incidents, one consistent direction.
After the $16 Million Stephanopoulos Settlement ABC News Still Has Not Changed
The White House documented it formally last November — ABC's debate moderators fact-checked Trump five times in October 2024 and left his opponent unchallenged once.
The 75-person division Bush describes may have lost its formal name.
The mission kept running.
What Bush revealed on Hannity's podcast isn't a piece of gossip — it's testimony from the one man who was physically inside the machine when the lever got pulled, who objected to what he saw, and who lost his career for being in the wrong place when it happened.
He watched NBC weaponize a private conversation to open a presidential debate.
He watched ABC pay $16 million because their anchor lied about a court verdict on national television.
The audience suspected all of this.
Now they have a witness who was in the room.
Sources:
- Joseph A. Wulfsohn, "ABC News Had a 75-Person Division Dedicated to 'Get' Trump, Billy Bush Claims," Fox News, April 6, 2026.
- "ABC News Is Fake News," The White House, November 19, 2025.
- "Brian Ross Out at ABC News Months After Botched Report on Donald Trump, Russia Tanked Stock Market," Fox News, July 3, 2018.
- "ABC News Suspends Brian Ross for 4 Weeks Over Erroneous Flynn Story," Time, December 3, 2017.
