President-elect Donald Trump seriously considered naming Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo as his running mate but was pushed back by aides because there wasn’t enough time to put her through a vetting process, according to a new book.
Trump “was serious about Bartiromo and was making the case for him on the flight to Butler, Pennsylvania,” Politico reporter Alex Isenstadt wrote in his new book, “Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power.” “.
“She was great with the big Wall Street types of donors and she knew how to do TV,” Trump told his team,” according to Isenstadt. An excerpt from the book, which was published by Grand Central Publishing and is forthcoming on sale March 18, CNN reported.
Trump survived the first of two assassination attempts during an appearance at a campaign rally in Butler on July 13. Two days later, the president-elect announced that he was selecting Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate.
When reached by The Post, Trump’s transition team did not specifically address the claim that Bartiromo, host of Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” was among the possible candidates for the No. 1 job. 2.
“Vice President-elect Vance was the perfect choice to be President Trump’s running mate,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told The Post.
“There is no one who is a better and stronger defender of the America First agenda, and he will continue to be a leader of the movement for years to come.”
The Post has sought comment from Fox Business Network and Bartiromo.
According to Isenstadt, the Brooklyn-born Bartiromo was a “Trump favorite” because she often defended him on air and conducted what he called “numerous softball interviews with him over the years, including his first on-air landing after the 2020 election. , for which she had given his team advance warning of her questions.”
But when Trump continued to push the idea of bringing Bartiromo on the ticket, he was told he “didn’t have time to vet Bartiromo, as they had spent months doing with the other candidates.”
Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, “ended the conversation,” according to CNN.
Isenstadt also claimed in his book that the Trump campaign was given the exact wording of questions to be asked at a Fox News town hall that took place in January of last year.
The town hall, which was moderated by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, took place in Des Moines, Iowa.
According to Isenstadt’s book, Trump aides didn’t want the president-elect to appear at the town hall because they were “still upset with Fox, whose coverage they continued to view as antagonistic, and they didn’t want the former president making prime time. event.”
But Trump agreed to the town hall because he “had a good relationship with Baier — they were golf buddies — and he wanted to have a meeting.”
A spokesman for the network dismissed the characterization of Baier as being “golf buddies” with Trump, noting that the two have played only a handful of times over the past decade.
Half an hour before the town hall began, a senior aide “began receiving text messages from a person inside Fox,” Isenstadt wrote.
“Very holy, thought the team. They were images of all the questions that would be asked of Trump and the planned follow-ups, right down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student taking a look at the test before the exam started,” Isenstadt wrote.
Baier and MacCallum asked Trump tough questions about his criminal charges, as well as whether he would “deny political violence” if he were reawakened.
“Trump was furious,” Isenstadt wrote, because he felt the questions were “like attacks designed to put him on the defensive.”
But “with the questions in hand” before the telecast, the team “collected the answers”.
“While we have no evidence of this happening, and Alex Isenstadt has readily refused to release the images for fact-checking, we take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate if it is proven there was a breach within the network,” a Fox. news spokesperson told The Post.
A source familiar with the network’s inner workings told The Post that “if there was a breach, it wasn’t by Bret or Martha or the highest editorial levels of the network, and there is a sophisticated and extensive digital footprint of all the material.” editorial. “
Fox News and Fox Business are subsidiaries of Fox Corp – a sister company of The Post’s parent company News Corp.
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