Karoline Leavitt Just Caught ABC News Hiding the One Word That Changes Everything

ABC News spent years paying $16 million in defamation settlements to make Trump look guilty.

Now they're doing it again – this time to make Americans afraid.

Karoline Leavitt just exposed exactly what they left out of their latest BREAKING news alert on Iran. And what ABC buried in that story tells you everything you need to know about who they're really working for.

ABC News Left One Word Out of the FBI Iran Drone California Alert

On March 11, ABC News fired off a BREAKING alert: the FBI warned California police that Iran wanted to launch drone attacks on the West Coast.

Scary stuff. Except ABC pulled one word from the actual FBI document before publishing.

That word was unverified.

The real alert – the one White House spokesman Ben Williamson posted side-by-side with ABC's version – opened with it. The FBI described the tip as unverified intelligence and acknowledged it had no details on timing, targets, or who might carry out any attack.

ABC stripped that word out and called it BREAKING news.

Leavitt went nuclear. She demanded an immediate retraction, calling the story deliberate misinformation designed to alarm the American public. Her bottom line: no such threat from Iran to the homeland exists, and it never did.

ABC News Iran War Coverage Has Been Fear-Mongering Since Day One

This isn't an isolated mistake. It's a campaign.

Since Operation Epic Fury launched on February 28, ABC News has run a sustained effort to terrify Americans about a war that's going exceptionally well.

They aired Iranian state media claims – regime propaganda – that a U.S. strike had destroyed an elementary school. Their reporters repeated the accusation twice without skepticism, treating Tehran's press office as a credible source.

They ran economic doom segments four days into the operation, finding scared drivers at gas stations to hammer the fear narrative home.

Their Sunday panel on This Week couldn't find a single supporter of the operation. Every guest attacked it.

On March 12, anchor David Muir linked the February CPI report – which came in at expectations – to gas prices from the Iran war. The Media Research Center documented him omitting a key phrase to manufacture the connection.

One network. Five separate incidents. Same direction every time.

What ABC Has Always Done to Trump

This isn't new behavior. It's a documented pattern going back years.

In 2017, ABC suspended anchor Brian Ross after he falsely reported that Trump directed Michael Flynn to contact Russian officials before the 2016 election. The story was wrong. The suspension didn't stop the next false story.

In 2024, George Stephanopoulos made repeated false claims about Trump's legal cases. ABC settled the resulting defamation lawsuit for $16 million and issued a statement of regret. That's not a correction. That's a confession.

During the 2024 presidential debate, ABC's fact-checkers flagged Trump at least five times. They didn't flag his opponent once.

After Trump won, 90% of ABC's coverage of his cabinet nominees was negative. Not critical – negative. Critical journalism asks hard questions. Negative journalism has already decided the answer.

Iran Drone Attack on California Was Already Impossible When ABC Ran the Story

Here's what ABC won't tell you about the supposed drone threat.

The two Iranian vessels capable of launching maritime drone attacks – the IRIS Shahid Bagheri and the IRINS Makran – were both reportedly damaged in U.S. military strikes during Operation Epic Fury, according to the BBC.

The launch capability ABC's BREAKING alert treated as an active threat had already been neutralized before they published a single word.

The FBI alert itself was distributed at the end of February – before the bulk of U.S. strikes degraded Iran's naval assets. A senior law enforcement official confirmed the 12-day bombardment had severely degraded Iran's capacity to carry out any such attack.

ABC knew all of this. They published anyway.

The Only Question That Matters

When a network deliberately strips a word from a government document to transform a non-threat into a BREAKING news scare – that's not a mistake. Mistakes go in random directions.

ABC's mistakes only go one way.

Every story scares you about Trump. Every story hands Democrats a talking point. Every BREAKING alert drops when the White House is winning.

The Iran drone story landed the same day Leavitt was managing a flood of news from a 12-day campaign that eliminated Iran's supreme leader, decimated its navy, and shattered four decades of conventional wisdom about Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

One deleted word. One BREAKING graphic. And suddenly Gavin Newsom is on television attacking Trump over a threat that never existed.

That's not journalism. That's a Democrat press release with a network logo.

Sources:

• Karoline Leavitt, @PressSec, X, March 12, 2026.
• Leslie Eastman, "Leavitt Refutes Story About Possible Iranian Drones Striking California," Legal Insurrection, March 12, 2026.
• Doug P., "Should Be Immediately Retracted: Karoline Leavitt Shreds ABC News' BREAKING Iran Threat Story," Twitchy, March 12, 2026.
• Jorge Bonilla, "Fake News: ABC News Falsely Ties February Inflation Data to Iran War," NewsBusters, March 12, 2026.
• Jorge Bonilla, "No Surprise: ABC Sunday Panel Unanimously Dumps on Operation Epic Fury," NewsBusters, March 8, 2026.
• Jorge Bonilla, "ABC This Week Parrots Iran Regime Media on Accidental School Strike," NewsBusters, March 1, 2026.
• "ABC News Is Fake News," White House, November 19, 2025.