AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
President-elect Donald Trump benefitted from a Fox News employee leaking the questions anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum planned to ask him during a high-profile town hall last January, according to a new book from Politico’s Alex Isenstadt.
In one excerpt from the book — Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power — shared with CNN, Isenstadt reported on the January 2024 town hall.
While the then-candidate’s team was “still peeved at Fox, whose coverage they continued to find antagonistic,” Trump himself “had a good relationship with Baier—they were golf buddies—and wanted to do a sit-down.”
From the book:
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.
But Trump was displeased. The leak revealed that 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,” “press Trump to ‘disavow political violence'” and ask about his focus on “retribution.”
“Trump was pissed,” and felt “like attacks designed to put him on the defensive,” wrote Isenstadt. Yet “with the questions in hand,” his team was able to prepare for the aggressive lines of questioning.
Isenstadt attributed his reporting to “multiple people with direct knowledge.” A spokesperson for Fox responded to the allegations with the following statement:
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.
Fox also disputed the description of Trump and Baier as golf buddies, insisting that they’ve only played together a few times.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump, said only that “President Trump was the most accessible and transparent candidate in American history, and it’s a big reason why he won in historic fashion.”
Notably, the revelation about Trump being fed questions comes just a few months after Trump — without evidence — accused ABC News of
“People are saying that Comrade Kamala Harris had the questions from Fake News ABC. I would say it is very likely,” wrote Trump in a post on Truth Social at the time before musing that “hopefully an investigation will be done as to whether or not they gave the Debate questions to Comrade Kamala whose best friends is a top ABC Executive.”
“If she did give the questions to Kamala, ABC’s license should be TERMINATED,” he concluded.
A source with knowledge relayed “If there was a breach, it was not from Bret or Martha or the top editorial levels of the network and there is a sophisticated and extensive digital footprint of all editorial material.