Fox News investigates claims insider leaked Trump questions for town hall

Fox News has launched an investigation into claims that an insider leaked questions to Donald Trump’s team minutes before a pivotal Iowa town hall last January.

According to a new book by the Politico reporter Alex Isenstadt, Trump’s aides received text messages containing the exact wording of questions and planned follow-ups minutes before the broadcast began. The town hall was moderated by the network anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.

The leak, if confirmed, covered sensitive topics including Trump’s business entanglements, his multiple indictments and potential plans for political payback.

In a statement, the network said it had “no evidence” of the leak but would investigate any potential breach.

“We take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate should there prove to be a breach within the network,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. A separate source familiar with Fox’s inner workings said if there had been a leak “it was not from Bret [Baier] or Martha [MacCallum] or the top editorial levels of the network”.

Isenstadt’s book, Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power, draws from more than 300 interviews and internal documents. It also reveals Trump seriously weighed picking the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo as his running mate before choosing JD Vance. Bartiromo had previously tipped off Trump’s team about interview questions after the 2020 election, according to texts unearthed during Congress’s January 6 investigation.

Trump has not publicly responded to the allegation. His communications director, Steven Cheung, said that it was a mark of Trump’s accessibility, claiming it fueled his primary victory.

“President Trump was the most accessible and transparent candidate in American history,” Cheung said.

The alleged incident echoes a pattern of journalistic ethics breaches during major political interviews. CNN fired its contributor and the former interim DNC chair Donna Brazile in 2016 for sharing town hall topics with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, while WURD Radio in Pennsylvania cut ties with the host Andrea Lawful-Sanders last summer for conducting a Biden interview with campaign-supplied questions.

Isenstadt, who logged extensive time with Trump including a June 2023 flight on his plane, told CNN multiple direct sources confirmed the town hall account.

While standing behind his reporting and sourcing, Fox News’s statement quipped that Isenstadt had “conveniently refused to release the images for fact checking.”