By Hadas Gold | CNN
New York (CNN) — President-elect Donald Trump’s team was given the questions asked by Fox News anchors at an Iowa town hall last January in advance by someone inside the network, according to a forthcoming book, in what would be a serious breach of journalism ethics.
The report, which Fox said it plans to investigate, comes from the forthcoming book “Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power” by Alex Isenstadt, a national political reporter at Politico. Isenstadt conducted more than 300 interviews for the book and is based on internal memos, notes and recordings as well as regular reporting trips to Palm Beach and a flight with Trump aboard his plane in June 2023.
In two excerpts shared exclusively with CNN, Isenstadt describes a deep relationship between Trump and those within Fox News. Isenstadt reports that in January 2024, then-candidate Trump was set to hold a town hall with Iowa voters moderated by Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, though not all of Trump’s advisers wanted him to attend.
They “were still peeved at Fox, whose coverage they continued to find antagonistic, and did not want the former president to do the prime time event,” Isenstadt writes. “But Trump had a good relationship with Baier—they were golf buddies—and wanted to do a sit-down.”
But unlike other Fox hosts, Baier and MacCallum were known to engage in tougher questioning of the former president. And Trump’s aides warned they’d press him on disavowing political violence and whether he planned to engage in political retribution if he were to win reelection, Isenstadt reports. But Trump wasn’t “taking prep for the telecast seriously. He’d basically be winging it.”
“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. Holy s–t, the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started,” Isenstadt writes.
Baier and MacCallum “planned to ask Trump if he would divest from his businesses if he won, and whether the party was taking a risk nominating him given his indictments.” They planned to “press Trump to “disavow political violence” and ask him if his White House “would be focused on retribution.”
“Trump was pissed,” Isenstadt writes, as he felt the questions were “like attacks designed to put him on the defensive.”
But “with the questions in hand” ahead of the telecast, the team “workshopped answers.”
Isenstadt told CNN the anecdote was based on “multiple people with direct knowledge” of the event and that he was fully confident in the reporting.
Asked about the account, a Fox spokesperson said “While we do not have any evidence of this occurring, and Alex Isenstadt has conveniently refused to release the images for fact checking, we take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate should there prove to be a breach within the network.”
The spokesperson also refuted the characterization of Baier being “golf buddies” with Trump, saying the two have only played a handful of times over the past decade.
Incoming White House communications director Steven Cheung did not directly address the book’s claims regarding the town hall, but said in a statement to CNN, “President Trump was the most accessible and transparent candidate in American history, and it’s a big reason why he won in historic fashion.”
In another portion of the book, Isenstadt reports that Trump seriously considered tapping Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo as his running mate, before being talked out of it by his team.
Bartiromo was a “Trump favorite” Isenstadt reports, after fiercely defending him and conducting “numerous softball interviews with him over the years, including his first on-air sit-down following the 2020 election, for which she had given his team a heads-up on her questions ahead of time.”
In 2022, CNN reported that Bartiromo had sent text messages to Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, outlining what she planned to ask in her interview with Trump in November 2020. The texts were revealed as part of Congress’ investigation into the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Isenstadt writes in his book that Trump “was dead serious about Bartiromo and was making the case for her during the flight to Butler (Pennsylvania). She was great with the big-donor Wall Street types and she knew how to do TV, Trump told his team.”
But Trump’s team said “(t)here “was no time to vet Bartiromo, as they had spent months doing with other candidates,” and chief of staff Susie Wiles put an end to the conversation.
Cheung, when reached for comment, did not directly address the claims regarding Bartiromo, saying “Vice President-elect Vance was the perfect choice to be President Trump’s running mate. There is nobody who is a better and stronger defender of the America First agenda, and he will continue to be a leader of the movement for years to come.”
“Revenge” is set to be released in March from Grand Central Publishing.
