Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump participates in a Fox News town hall at the Greenville Convention Center on February 20, 2024 in Greenville, South Carolina. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
A new book claims that Donald Trump was given questions from a Fox News town hall in advance.
CNN shared excerpts from “Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power” by Politico’s Alex Isenstadt to illustrate the president-elect’s close relationship with the conservative news network. In one, Isenstadt claims that Trump’s team was fed the questions that moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum planned to ask in a January 2024 town hall.
“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,” Isenstadt wrote in the book due out this March. “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.”
While Baier is known for being a tougher interviewer than many of his Fox News counterparts, the book paints a picture of a close relationship between the anchor and Trump, calling them “golf buddies.” A Fox News spokesperson denied this characterization in an email to Salon.
Baier landed in hot water earlier this year after he provided cover for Trump during an interview with then-candidate Kamala Harris. The host responded to Harris’ concern about Trump calling Democrats the “enemy from within” by playing a deceptively edited clip of Trump speaking. Baier later admitted that he had made “a mistake.”
The network denied any collusion between themselves and Trump in a statement to 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,” they told CNN.
A source familiar with the inner workings of the network told Salon that the alleged breach would not have come from either the anchors or higher-ups.
“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,” they shared.
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