According to a forthcoming book, Someone at Fox News sent Donald Trump photos of the planned questions and follow-up questions before his Iowa town hall. The book also says he wanted Maria Bartiromo to be his VP.
I wrote about Fox's Iowa town hall "cheat sheet" for Crooks and Liars today:
CNN got an exclusive look at excerpts from a forthcoming book by Politico’s Alex Isenstadt. He reports that in January 2024, Trump had agreed to a “sit down” with his “golf buddy” the supposedly serious journalist Bret Baier. (Incidentally, Baier just sold his D.C. “French chateau-style estate,” worth about $30 million, to Trump pick for commerce secretary and likely crooked billionaire Howard Lutnick.)
But, apparently, Trump’s aides worried that he wasn't “taking prep for the telecast seriously." They thought Baier and cohost Martha MacCallum might ask some tough questions and that he'dg "basically be winging it."
So Fox “News” did a solid for its favorite (now that Roger Ailes has died) p***y grabber. Someone texted “a senior aide” images of the planned questions and the follow ups “down to the exact wording,” according to the book. The team then “workshopped answers.”
Team Trump has not denied the report. Fox News says it is “investigating.”
I have almost no doubt it’s true. You can read my full post at Crooks and Liars.
But wait, there’s more. Isenstadt also reported that Trump wanted Maria Bartiromo for VP. My C&L colleague, Frances Langum wrote that one up. She noted that the critical information in Isenstadt’s book “would have been useful when voters needed it, but book sales.”
She also quoted more from CNN’s report:
"Isenstadt writes in his book that Trump 'was dead serious about Bartiromo and was making the case for her during the flight to Butler (Pennsylvania). She was great with the big-donor Wall Street types and she knew how to do TV, Trump told his team.'
But Trump’s team said '(t)here “was no time to vet Bartiromo, as they had spent months doing with other candidates,' and chief of staff Susie Wiles put an end to the conversation."
Check out Fran’s full post at Crooks and Liars, too.
The CNN article indicates that Trump's desire for Bartiromo was an impulse decision made late in the process. That, in turn, suggests he was not entirely thrilled with J.D. Vance, a guy who once called Trump a “total fraud” and “America’s Hitler” before deciding he (Vance) loves Hitler and fraud. For what it’s worth, my personal belief is that Trump Puppeteer Elon Musk told his boy to get a tech billionaire-bro loyalist, like Vance, not a mere Trump loyalist like Bartiromo.
But it’s easy to see why Trump would have wanted Bartiromo. Media Matters has a good reminder of this top-of-the-Fox-line of disgraces to journalism and the United States:
Bartiromo was instrumental in advancing 2020 election conspiracy theories that led to the January 6 insurrection, particularly the claims that Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines flipped votes. The companies sued Fox News and other conservative media outlets for spreading these bogus conspiracy theories, and Fox ultimately settled with Dominion for $787 million. Bartiromo was repeatedly named throughout the various lawsuits, and it was later revealed that she took directives from the Trump campaign to promote the plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Bartiromo’s election conspiracy theories continued into the 2024 election. In several segments, for example, Bartiromo elevated an extremely flimsy claim that undocumented immigrants were obtaining drivers licenses to vote — based on the wife of a friend of a friend alleging that they saw “a massive line of immigrants” outside of a Texas Department of Motor Vehicles office, which Bartiromo interpreted to mean “illegals.” A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety noted that assuming that nonwhite Texans are undocumented is “kind of racist” and called her story “simply false.”
In 2023, Bartiromo pushed a story on her show more than 200 times from an FBI informant who claimed that President Joe Biden and his son Hunter took bribes from a Ukrainian oligarch. The informant, Alexander Smirnov, was ultimately indicted for lying to the bureau and allegedly fabricated his accusations — news which Bartiromo later attempted to downplay, after using her Fox show to promote Smirnov’s debunked claims as “the most serious charges ever leveled at a President.”
Instead, we’ll get the senator who endangered his own constituents with an “immigrants in Ohio are eating pets” lie, then defended lying for the sake of defeating Kamala Harris.
(Trump image by DonkeyHotey, via Flickr and Creative Commons license.
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