Former television host Billy Bush claims ABC News operated a dedicated division of roughly 75 people whose mission was to take down Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, an allegation that, if accurate, would confirm what many conservatives have long suspected about the network's editorial posture toward the man who won that race and now occupies the White House for a second term.
Bush made the claim on a recent installment of the "Hang Out with Sean Hannity" podcast, as reported by Fox News Digital. ABC News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The allegation carries a particular weight coming from Bush. He was the man on the other end of the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape, the off-air conversation with Trump that detonated in October 2016, cost Bush his job at NBC, and became arguably the single most consequential piece of opposition media deployed against a presidential candidate in modern history.
Bush told Hannity he personally knew the individual who led the ABC News division in question, though he did not publicly identify that person. His description was blunt.
"ABC News had a division. 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."
Bush went on to describe his final meeting with then-NBC News chairman Andy Lack before his departure from the Peacock network. He recalled confronting Lack about the decision to release and, in Bush's word, "weaponize" the "Access Hollywood" footage, specifically because a presidential debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton was scheduled for that Sunday night.
"I said, 'Andy, I understand what you want to do with this and what you want to weaponize this because there's a debate on Sunday night, the second debate with Hillary and Donald.'"
Bush said the tape's release worked exactly as intended. Anderson Cooper moderated that debate, and Bush claimed the footage was "the first question to come out of Anderson Cooper's mouth."
The former host's assessment of the moment was unsparing.
"This was it! This was, there has always been an 'it' to get Trump, but this was definitely it at the time."
Bush's allegation does not exist in a vacuum. ABC News has accumulated a record of editorial missteps, all of them pointed in the same political direction, that lends his claim a certain plausibility, even without independent corroboration of the 75-person division itself.
In 2017, the network was forced to retract a bombshell report from chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross. That story alleged fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn would testify that Trump had ordered him to make contact with Russian officials about foreign policy while Trump was still a candidate. The report was false. Ross was later forced out of the network.
The pattern continued. In December 2024, just weeks before Trump was sworn into office for his second term, Disney-owned ABC News paid a $16 million settlement to Trump. The payment resolved a defamation lawsuit Trump had filed earlier that year over comments made by "This Week" anchor George Stephanopoulos, who falsely claimed on air that Trump had been "found liable for rape" in the E. Jean Carroll civil case. A civil jury had actually found Trump liable for "sexual abuse," not rape, a legal distinction Stephanopoulos erased on national television. The settlement was reportedly approved by then-Disney CEO Bob Iger and included an apology from the network.
The White House has also pushed back on ABC News reporting in other contexts, demanding retractions when the network omitted material facts from its coverage.
And last year, longtime ABC News correspondent Terry Moran was fired for attacking Trump and White House aide Stephen Miller on social media. That termination came after years in which the network's editorial tone toward the Trump administration had been a persistent source of conservative criticism.
Bush's account of the tape's deployment deserves close attention. His argument was not that the footage should have been suppressed forever. It was that the timing and intent behind its release amounted to a political operation, not journalism.
He drew a distinction between casual off-air conversation and material that newsrooms would normally treat as unusable. Bush compared the "Access Hollywood" recording to his own pre-interview banter with Hannity.
"I chit-chat with Sean Hannity, you know, 15 minutes before we sit down for an interview. The camera happens to be rolling. Whatever we talk about is not usable... that can't be [weaponized] but this was a special circumstance because of who was running and how they felt about him."
That last line is the most telling. Bush is saying the normal rules of engagement were suspended, not because of what was on the tape, but because of who was on it. The journalistic standards that would protect any other public figure's off-air remarks were set aside because the target was Trump.
The broader friction between Trump and the press has only intensified since 2016. Trump himself has celebrated FCC calls to examine network broadcast licenses, a move that reflects the depth of his grievance with legacy media institutions.
Bush's specific claim, that ABC News maintained a formal 75-person division targeting Trump, is, at this point, a single-source allegation. He has not named the person who ran it. ABC News has not responded. No internal documents or former employees have surfaced to corroborate the claim independently.
That matters. Conservatives rightly demand evidence before accepting explosive charges, and the same standard applies here.
But the broader picture Bush describes does not require a leap of faith. ABC News retracted a false Flynn report. It paid $16 million to settle a defamation suit. It fired a correspondent for anti-Trump social media posts. Its star anchor falsely characterized a civil verdict against a sitting president on air. These are not allegations. They are facts, each one pointing in the same editorial direction.
The question is not whether ABC News harbored hostility toward Trump. The question is whether that hostility was organized, resourced, and directed from within the network's institutional structure, or whether it simply seeped through the culture of a newsroom where virtually everyone shared the same political assumptions.
Bush says it was the former. The record, even without his testimony, strongly suggests something more than coincidence.
Meanwhile, the political establishment that once aligned against Trump continues to maneuver. Reports of Nancy Pelosi backing Gavin Newsom for 2028 suggest the institutional machinery that tried to stop Trump in 2016 is already positioning for the next cycle.
And the tension between this White House and the press corps shows no sign of easing. Trump has publicly rebuked reporters for conduct he views as adversarial rather than journalistic, a posture shaped, in no small part, by the kind of institutional opposition Bush now describes.
If Bush's allegation is even partially true, the implications extend well beyond one network's editorial decisions in one election cycle. A 75-person division dedicated to a political outcome is not a newsroom. It is a campaign operation with press credentials.
The damage from that kind of arrangement falls on ordinary Americans who rely on broadcast news to tell them what happened, not to tell them what to think about a candidate. When a network deploys its resources to achieve a political result, every story it produces becomes suspect. Every "bombshell" carries an asterisk. Every retraction looks less like an honest mistake and more like a failed operation.
ABC News has had nearly a decade to address these questions. It has responded with silence, settlements, and personnel changes that came only after the failures became too public to ignore.
Bush lost his career over that tape. ABC News lost $16 million, a correspondent, and a chief investigative reporter. The network still hasn't lost the one thing that made all of it possible: the presumption that it operates as a neutral news organization.
That presumption is the real casualty here, and no settlement check will bring it back.
