Trump camp was fed questions for Fox News town hall in advance from person inside network, new book says

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. 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.” Donald Trump during a Fox News town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 10, 2024. 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.