Former President Donald Trump kept in touch with Russian President Vladimir Putin after Trump left office, according to “War,” a new book by famed reporter Bob Woodward.
An aide to Trump told Woodward he was once asked to leave a room at Trump’s home in Florida so he could have a private phone call with Putin.
“According to Trump’s aide, there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021,” Woodward wrote, according to CNN, which obtained a copy of the book ahead of its release later this month.
Trump has spoken fondly of Putin over the years; he used the words “genius” and “savvy” to describe Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, for instance. Trump claimed to have been the victim of a “witch hunt” when the Justice Department investigated his 2016 campaign’s contacts with Russian sources.
Woodward reported in “War” that Avril Haines, President Joe Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, said she didn’t know whether Trump and Putin have spoken.
“I wouldn’t purport to speak to what President Trump may or may not have done,” Haines said, according to Woodward.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, a Trump campaign spokesman claimed Woodward fabricated everything in his book.
“None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in an emailed statement Tuesday.
Cheung said Woodward is angry because Trump sued him last year for publishing audiotapes of their conversations for one of his previous books. Trump repeatedly praised Woodward on the tapes, calling him a “great historian.”
“President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue,” Cheung said. “Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally, and he’s slow, lethargic, incompetent and overall a boring person with no personality.”
Another revelation in Woodward’s new title is that Trump sent Putin a secret shipment of COVID-19 testing equipment in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, when tests could sometimes be hard to come by. Putin reportedly begged Trump not to tell.
“I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Putin said, according to Woodward. “They don’t care about me.”
“War” is scheduled for release on Oct. 15.
