Donald Trump’s team was fed the questions asked by Fox News anchors at an Iowa town hall last January, according to an upcoming book by Alex Isenstadt, a national political reporter at Politico.
In an excerpt from the book Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power obtained by CNN, Isenstadt revealed that less than an hour before the town hall moderated by Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, someone at Fox leaked the questions to Trump along with the reporters’ planned follow-up questions.
“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, who has asked Trump tougher questions than their colleagues at Fox, had “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,” according to Isenstadt.
They planned to “press Trump to “disavow political violence” and ask him if his White House “would be focused on retribution.”
Trump was “pissed” because he felt the questions were “like attacks designed to put him on the defensive” Isenstadt writes. But since he was given the questions in advance, his team “workshopped answers.”
In a statement, a Fox News spokesperson told CNN: “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.”
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump, did not outright denied that the campaign was fed questions, just 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.”
This comes months after Trump falsely accused ABC News of providing Kamala Harris with the questions ahead of the pair’s only debate in September and called for the network’s license to be “terminated.”
“People are saying that Comrade Kamala Harris had the questions from Fake News ABC. I would say it is very likely,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post at the time, adding “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 added.
