| Taxpayers also get a 40% stake in the new shipyard, on terms the White House hasn't published. |
| LEAD ESSAY / 4 MIN / 3 DOCUMENTS / STORY FILE ANDURIL-1789 |
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| What would you want to know before you put $50 million into a defense company? |
| I can tell you what I'd want. Give me the customer list, and tell me what each buyer plans to spend next year... because in defense, the biggest buyer is almost always the government. |
| Most of us never get to see that list. So when a fund with the president's son as a partner owns a piece of a company, and the government then places a large order with it, you have every right to ask how it happened. Let me walk you through what's on paper. |
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$2.9 billion, paid as the parts get built |
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| On October 6, President Trump stood at Sparrows Point, an old steel site outside Baltimore, and announced a new shipyard for Anduril Industries. Anduril says it'll put $3.7 billion of its own money into the yard. And the Navy has given the company a contract worth up to $2.9 billion, according to Anduril's release as reported by USNI News. |
| That contract is tied to output, which in plain English means the Navy pays as finished parts show up. The first parts are torpedo tubes for Virginia-class attack submarines. Then Trump added a detail that hadn't come up on the morning press call. He said taxpayers would get a 40% stake in the new yard, and Fox News reports the terms of that stake still haven't been released. |
| So who owns Anduril? Anduril is a private company, which means its owners are a short list of founders and investment funds. One of those funds is 1789 Capital, and Donald Trump Jr. is one of its partners. |
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| "Don Jr. has no ability to decide any investments at this fund." |
| 1789 CAPITAL SPOKESPERSON, VIA ABC NEWS |
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| That's how the firm answers the question, and I want you to have it in full. But the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee read the same record and came to a very different view. |
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Jamie Raskin's eight-page letter |
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| Six weeks before the shipyard event, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland wrote to 1789 Capital and its partners, Don Jr. among them. The firm is a venture capital fund, which in plain English pools money from wealthy backers to buy stakes in private companies before they go public. Raskin's letter is the document behind today's story. |
| FILED / RASKIN LETTER TO 1789 CAPITAL |
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| The August 26 letter says Anduril won a $22 billion Army headset contract, reassigned from Microsoft, three weeks after the 2025 inauguration. It cites a further $20 billion Army award in March 2026. And it demands the fund's records, including its talks with federal officials, by September 9. |
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| On that deadline, the fund's lawyers answered, and Axios got a copy of the reply. They wrote that Raskin mixed up separate companies and misread several deals. Their letter also argued that a family tie, by itself, proves nothing about any single investment, while Raskin's staff told Axios the probe would go on. |
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The $50 million from 1789 Capital |
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| Here's the figure that links the fund to the shipyard. 1789 Capital put $50 million into Anduril during a $2.5 billion funding round last year, Anduril's founder has said, and ABC News reported it. ABC adds that it's a small stake in a company now valued above $60 billion, and the fund says a three-person committee without Don Jr. picks its deals. |
| You should also know that ABC had to fix its own work. Its first version, posted October 7, put government money for companies backed by the Trump sons above $6 billion, and two days later ABC replaced it with a corrected story. So I'm leaving that number out. What's left is on paper, and you can read Raskin's letter yourself, all eight pages of it. |
| Now think about your own stake in this. Your taxes pay for the torpedo tubes, and your taxes back a 40% stake on terms you haven't seen. And each dollar that makes Anduril worth more also makes the 1789 stake worth more... so the one party in this deal with no say on the price is the one paying it. |
