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. Putin reportedly said, “Please don’t tell anyone. It’s you who will be angry, not me.”
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.
Attempts Tuesday to confirm post-White House communications between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin were unsuccessful. Nineteen current and former officials and career intelligence officials from the Trump and Biden administrations contacted by the Times on Tuesday said they had no knowledge of any contact between Trump and Putin in the years since Trump left office. He said he didn’t know.
U.S. and Russian officials publicly announced in 2020 that coronavirus supplies were sent to Russia shortly after Trump and Putin’s May 7 phone call. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the time that “some testing equipment was being sent as well as ventilators.” But the officials did not say it was Mr. Putin’s personal goal, nor did they say that the Russian president had advised Mr. Trump to keep the conversation secret.
Mr. Trump’s campaign on Tuesday attacked Mr. Woodward’s book with typical personal insults, accusing him of being “slow, listless, incompetent, and generally a boring human being with no personality,” reports said. The proposal was dismissed without mentioning any specific details. among them.
“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.
Woodward’s book also includes other tantalizing reports that rocked Washington on Tuesday, including a profanity-filled attack on President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over last year’s Gaza war. It also includes abusive language.
Among the stories Mr. Woodward recounts is a private Fourth of July lunch after Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate performance, during which he met his longtime confidant, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. However, he gently tried to bring up the idea of the president withdrawing from the campaign.
“I don’t want to see your legacy in jeopardy,” Blinken reportedly told Biden, adding that every president is entitled to “a line” as a historical legacy. “It would be great if this decision led to him staying and getting re-elected,” Blinken said. “If that means you stay and lose re-election, that’s the verdict.”
The book also reports that Biden was furious over the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and came to regret appointing Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. . “I shouldn’t have chosen Garland,” Biden told his colleagues, according to the book.
After former President George W. Bush’s failed bid to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, the president received solace from an unlikely source. “Well, I understand what you’re going through,” Bush told Biden, according to the book. Mr. Bush also said he felt the intelligence officials were unfriendly.
On Russia, Biden accused his former ticket mate, President Barack Obama, of undermining Russia’s response to an earlier, more limited invasion of Ukraine in 2014. “That’s why we’re here,” Biden reportedly said. friend. He added: “Barak has never taken Putin seriously.”
After reporting on Woodward’s book on Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris criticized Trump for being too close to Putin, citing the provision of coronavirus testing equipment. “Everyone was scrambling to get these kits,” she said in an interview on Howard Stern’s satellite radio show. “This man, the president of the United States, is sending them to Russia, to a murderous dictator, for his personal use.”
Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, insulted Mr. Woodward in response to a question about the former president’s possible contacts with Mr. Putin, saying he had no contact with Mr. Trump on the subject. He said he had not discussed it. “Even if it’s true,” Vance added, there’s nothing wrong with talking to world leaders.
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 the possible terms Mr. Vance outlined last month seemed very similar to what Mr. Putin would want. 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.
Former presidents occasionally meet with foreign presidents after leaving office. In fact, Trump has hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy 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.
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 Trump’s top campaign aide Jason Miller as saying, “I haven’t heard them talking about it, so I’m not going to press that.” 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 Mr. Biden, sidestepped the question in response to Mr. Woodward. “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.”
Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Julian E. Burns, Anton Troianovsky, Valerie Hopkins, Katie Rogers, Chris Cameron and Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.
