Trump secretly stayed in touch with Putin after leaving office, book says

Washington: Former President Donald Trump has secretly spoken with President Vladimir Putin of Russia as many as seven times since leaving office, even as he was pressuring Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine to fight Russian invaders, according to a new book by journalist Bob Woodward.

The book, titled War and scheduled to be published next week, describes a scene in early 2024 at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's estate in Florida, when the former president ordered an aide out of his office so he could conduct a phone call with Putin. The unidentified aide said the two may have spoken a half-dozen other times as well since Trump left the White House.

The book also reports that Trump, while still in office early during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, secretly sent Putin what were then rare tests for the virus for the Russian's personal use.

Putin, who has been described as particularly anxious about being infected at the time, urged Trump to not publicly reveal the gesture because it could damage the American president politically. "I don't want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me," Putin reportedly told him.

The disclosures raise new questions about Trump's relationship with Putin just weeks before an election that will determine whether the former president will reclaim the White House. A copy of the 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 often appears as a commentator, also reported on the book Tuesday.

Trump's campaign dismissed Woodward's book by assailing the author with typically personal insults -- "a total sleazebag," "slow, lethargic, incompetent and overall a boring person with no personality" -- without addressing any of the specifics reported in it.

"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," Steven Cheung, the campaign communications director, said in the statement. Cheung said Trump did not give Woodward access for the book and noted that the former president was suing the author over a previous book.

The statement did not explicitly say whether Trump has spoken with Putin since leaving office, but the former president's oft-expressed affinity for the master of the Kremlin has long baffled even his own appointees, prompted investigations and troubled Republican national security specialists.

US intelligence agencies concluded that Putin ordered the Russian government to intervene in the 2016 election to help Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a conclusion that Trump rejected, suggesting that he believed Putin's denial. While special counsel Robert Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy that could be proved in court, he documented an unusual number of contacts between Russia and people in Trump's circle during that campaign.

Since leaving office, Trump has continued to praise Putin. He called the Russian leader a "genius" when Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022 and since then has refused to say that Ukraine should win the war. He has criticized US aid to Ukraine and leaned on congressional Republicans not to approve more assistance. He has boasted that if he wins he will negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine within 24 hours and do so even before the inauguration.

Trump has not explained how he would do that, but possible terms described last month by his running mate, Sen. J D Vance, R-Ohio, sounded a lot like what Putin would want. Vance said that Russia could keep the Ukrainian territory it has seized by force in violation of international law and receive a "guarantee of neutrality" from Ukraine, which would not be allowed to join NATO.

Woodward's book does not report what Trump and Putin discussed in the call in early 2024, nor does it provide details about the additional calls mentioned by the Trump aide. It quotes Jason Miller, a top campaign aide to Trump, saying that he had "not heard that they're talking, so I'd push back on that." But Miller also said that "I'm sure they'd know how to get in touch with each other" if they did want to talk.

Former presidents from time to time meet with foreign counterparts after leaving office. In fact Trump has hosted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and others at Mar-a-Lago. But those meetings were publicly known, and Trump posed for pictures with his guests.

It would be highly unusual for a former president to privately talk with a top US adversary like Putin without clearing it with the current administration -- especially at a time when the United States and Russia are on opposite sides of a war in Europe. President Joe Biden has not spoken with Putin since the invasion of Ukraine.