FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez warned that the Trump administration is using her agency to wage a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control” against ABC in a letter to the network’s parent company, Disney.

Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, wrote to Disney chief executive Josh D’Amaro on Monday alleging the agency under Republican chair Brendan Carr had been repurposed to pressure “a free and independent press and all media into submission.”

The letter, reported on by the Wall Street Journal, follows a series of FCC investigations into Disney’s DEI practices and ABC, as well as the FCC’s decision to revive a complaint about ABC’s moderation of a 2024 presidential debate between President Donald Trump and then-Democratic presidential rival Kamala Harris.

In April, the FCC ordered eight ABC-owned television stations to file early license renewal requests, a step often associated with potential fines or licensing challenges. That came shortly after Trump publicly called for the firing of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke about Melania Trump celebrating Trump’s impending death.

Gomez argued the investigations were “not a series of coincidental regulatory actions.”

Raising a separate incident in 2025, when Disney temporarily suspended Kimmel amid MAGA backlash to a false claim Kimmel made about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Gomez wrote: “The goal was clear: use regulatory pressure to force his removal from the air and send a message to every other broadcaster about the cost of critical coverage.”

Referencing ABC’s $16 million settlement in Trump’s 2024 defamation suit against anchor George Stephanopoulos, Gomez warned Disney: “That settlement did not buy you peace. You cannot buy this Administration’s favor. For the right price, you can only borrow it. And the price always goes up.”

“The threat is the point,” she wrote, adding: “As sitting Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch recently reminded us by invoking Justice Thurgood Marshall: ‘The value of a sword of Damocles is that it hangs, not that it drops.’”

Gomez vowed to use “every tool available” to her “to shine a light on what this FCC is doing to curtail press freedom and to hold this process to account at every step.”

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