Former President Donald J. Trump has targeted Russia’s Vladimir V. Putin seven times since leaving office, despite pressure on Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine to fight the Russian aggressor. A new book published by a newspaper reveals that he had a secret meeting with the president. Journalist Bob Woodward.
The book, titled “War,” is scheduled to be published next week and will be set in early 2024 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida, where the former president tells the president’s inner circle he is leaving to carry out presidential duties. The scene depicts the command. Phone call with Putin. An anonymous aide said the two may have spoken as many as six more times since Trump left the White House.
The book also alleges that while Trump was still in office at the beginning of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, he secretly sent a then-rare Abbott point-of-care test machine to Putin for the personal use of Russians. It is reported that Mr. Putin, who was said to be particularly worried about the infection at the time, asked Mr. Trump not to reveal the gesture publicly because it could cause political damage to the American president. “Please don’t tell anyone. It’s you who will be offended, not me,” Putin reportedly said.
The revelations raise new questions about Mr. Trump’s relationship with Mr. Putin, weeks before an election that will determine whether the former president regains the White House. A copy of this book was obtained by the New York Times. The Washington Post, where Woodward has worked for more than half a century, and CNN, where he is a frequent commentator, also reported on the book on Tuesday.
Mr. Woodward, who rose to fame for his coverage of the Watergate scandal and regularly publishes best-selling books with explosive reporting based on access to high-level sources, is an expert on the relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin. An unnamed aide in the book attributed his explanation of continued communication to one Mr. Trump. The aide said only that Woodward had been in contact with “probably about seven people,” without providing specific details. There was no immediate independent confirmation Tuesday.
The Trump campaign dismissed Woodward’s book with typical personal insults, calling the author “slow, lethargic, incompetent, and generally boring” without mentioning any of the specifics reported in it. He attacked and dismissed him as a “complete despicable human being”. .
“None of these fabricated stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly psychotic man suffering from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” campaign communications director Stephen Chan said in a statement. . Chan said Trump did not give Woodward access to the book, noting that the former president is suing the author over an earlier book.
The Kremlin similarly denied reports in Woodward’s book about conversations between Trump and Putin and the provision of coronavirus tests. “This is not true,” spokesman Dmitri Peskov said in a text message. “It’s a typical bogus story in the context of a pre-election political campaign.”
A statement from the Trump campaign largely disputed Woodward’s account, but did not say whether Woodward had spoken to Putin since leaving office, and the campaign did not immediately respond to questions about it. But Mr. Trump’s frequently expressed affinity for his Kremlin masters has long confounded even his own appointees, prompted investigations and troubled Republican national security experts.
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Putin ordered the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election to help Trump defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a conclusion Trump rejects. and suggested that he believed Putin’s denials. Although Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III did not find a criminal conspiracy that could be proven in court, there was an unusual number of contacts between Russia and people around Mr. Trump during the campaign. This was documented.
Trump has continued to praise Putin since leaving office. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he called the Russian leader a “genius” and has since refused to say Ukraine should win the war. He has criticized U.S. aid to Ukraine and called on Congressional Republicans not to approve more aid. He has boasted that if he wins, he will negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, even before his inauguration.
Mr. Trump has not explained how he would do that, but possible conditions that his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, described last month are very similar to what Mr. Putin wants. It sounded like there was. Vance said Russia could maintain Ukrainian territory it had seized by force in violation of international law and receive “guarantees of neutrality” from Ukraine, but it would not allow Ukraine to join NATO.
Vice President Kamala Harris criticized Trump’s relationship with Putin in an interview on “60 Minutes” Monday night. “Right now, we support Ukraine’s ability to defend against Russia’s unprovoked aggression,” she said. “If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kiev right now. He’d say, ‘Oh, he can finish it on the first day.’ Do you know what it is? It’s about surrender. ”
Woodward’s book does not report what Trump and Putin discussed during the early 2024 phone call, and does not provide details about additional calls mentioned by Trump’s aides. Not yet. The paper quoted Jason Miller, a top Trump campaign aide, as saying, “I haven’t heard them talking about it, so I’m not claiming it.” But Miller also said that if they wanted to talk, “I’m sure they would know how to reach each other.”
Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence appointed by President Biden, sidestepped Woodward’s question. “I don’t pretend to know all my contacts with President Putin,” she told him. “I’m not going to talk about what President Trump did or didn’t do.”
Former presidents occasionally meet with foreign presidents after leaving office. In fact, Trump has hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at Mar-a-Lago. But these meetings were publicly known, and Mr. Trump posed for photos with the guests.
It is highly unusual for a former president to meet privately with America’s biggest adversary, like Mr. Putin, without clearing negotiations with the current administration, especially at a time when the United States and Russia are opposed to each other in the war in Europe. Especially when you’re by his side. Mr. Biden has not spoken to Mr. Putin since the invasion of Ukraine.
