In 2022 when NewsBusters first counted the legal notes being delivered by ABC’s The View, we found that they were forced to issue exactly three dozen (36) of them. A lot can change in two and a half years. The View has issued exactly ZERO legal notes, thus far in 2025. That’s despite the fact that there was more than enough need for them.
Between January 6 and July 25, 2025, the second half of the show’s 28th season, the cast was made to read ZERO legal notes.
Often delivered by co-host Sunny Hostin thanks to her history as a former federal prosecutor, legal notes were a way for the cast to protect ABC News from legal liability for the wild claims they made.
For instance, in 2022, their favorite target was Ginni Thomas, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. They had to issue five legal notes about their smears against her, the most for any single person that year. After repeatedly pushing the same false accusation that she was at the head of the January 6 mob that stormed the Capitol, Hostin would robotically repeat the same lines:
Ginni Thomas has denied any conflict of interest between her activism and her husband's position on the supreme court. She acknowledges attending the stop-the-steal rally, but says she left because it was cold, and denies she was involved in organizing it.
While the legal notes may have evaporated in 2025, the need didn’t.
In 2025, there had thus far been three instances which they pushed the unfounded conspiracy theory that President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk rigged the 2024 presidential election.
On May 1, bitter about Trump posting on social media bragging about investors predicting he would win the election, moderator Whoopi Goldberg scolded Trump and warned him to stop lest someone poke around and discover insider knowledge of his impending victory:
I want to remind people that he took credit for Biden’s economy – BOOMING economy, claiming investors knew he was going to win. I think he should stop saying that because you’re going to make somebody investigate how investigators would know you were going to win. I'm just putting that out there. You know.
Along with claiming Musk killed nearly 300,000 kids, the June 4 episode saw all three of The View’s elder-matrons team up to suggest that Trump was afraid of Musk because he had the “receipts” for how Trump really won the 2024 presidential election (Click “expand”):
GOLDBERG: And then that if one was going to think, you know, ‘ooh, maybe this happened.’ You know, Elon knows the 411 on everything.
HOSTIN: Yeah, he got all that information.
GOLDBERG: He knows how all this came down. So now, suddenly he's like, ‘well, oh, harrumph.’
[Laughter]
JOY BEHAR: So, Trump should be afraid of him because he –
GOLDBERG: I think Trump is afraid of him.
BEHAR: - because he has the receipts on the election too.
GOLDBERG: I think he is afraid of him.
“We have a broken system right now because there is no oversight. We have a broken system because there is a President who doesn't believe in the Constitution and who defies judicial orders,” proclaimed co-host Ana Navarro, on July 7, “And Elon Musk and his 300-plus-million dollars, and God knows what else he may have done that we don't know of, own the problem that he created.”
ABC News’s Standards and Practices apparently didn’t have a problem with them making such false claims about the election to millions of viewers.
On June 9, The View claimed Trump had ordered National Guard troops to “attack the protesters” in Los Angeles, California and start a “civil war.”
On April 30, they allowed a guest to claim that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was going to go around America and abduct children.
And just days after Trump’s inauguration, on January 24, Navarro echoed a false claim Goldberg made last year insisting that Trump was going to outlaw interracial marriages.
More recently, on July 9, they suggested - without evidence - that Trump was on the Epstein client list; a theme that was perpetuated nearly every day for the last couple weeks of the season.
The closest they came to issuing a legal note was on February 27 when co-host Joy Behar begged Musk not to sue her for defamation after she erroneously claimed he was “pro apartheid.” “I'm getting some flack because I said that Musk was pro-apartheid,” she huffed. “He was around at that time. But maybe he was, maybe he wasn't … So don't be suing me, okay, Elon?”
In a 2023 episode of their Behind the Table podcast, the show’s executive producer Brian Teta defended their use of legal notes.
“We’re an opinion show. We’re speaking off-the-cuff,” he said. “We get it wrong and we correct it and we acknowledge it.” Teta insisted “a legal note is not a correction” but rather “is something that as a part of ABC News we are asked to do to make sure we’re presenting all statements and sides.”
After the 2024 election, Behar suggested their legal notes were why people liked the show. “But I think that's why people like our show, because they know that we are checked by ABC News...If we're wrong, we have the legal note here,” Behar quipped as she pointed to Hostin.
Their apparent new refusal to deliver legal notes came at a time when there was more legal scrutiny placed on the media, particularly the legacy broadcasters. ABC News and CBS both recently have settled defamation suits brought by Trump.
Recently, the White House and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr made headlines that seemed to hint there could be action taken against The View, with the latter specifically citing their legal notes.
