Vladimir Putin urged Donald Trump not to tell anyone after the then-U.S. president secretly sent COVID-19 test machines for the Russian leader’s private use during the pandemic, according to a bombshell new book by Bob Woodward.
Woodward also claims the two men continued their relationship after Trump left the White House with “maybe as many as seven” secret calls since 2021.
The Watergate journalist writes that Trump sent a “bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines” to Putin in 2020.
Putin reportedly warned Trump that he’d make people “mad” if he admitted to sending the equipment.
“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump, according to CNN, which has obtained an advance copy of the Woodward book, War.
“I don’t care. Fine,” Trump is said to have replied.
“No, no. I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me,” Woodward quotes the Russian leader as saying.
In March 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for the Abbott COVID-19 test machines to be made available in the States, despite not being FDA approved, to help detect the novel coronavirus as quickly as in five minutes for positive results and 13 minutes for negatives.
Woodward, 81, writes that the relationship with Putin continued after Trump left the White House. “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,” he claims in the book, according to CNN.
The former Washington Post reporter, credited with Carl Bernstein with exposing the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, claims that Trump asked a senior aide to leave the room at Mar-a-Lago so “he could have what he said was a private phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
Trump aide Jason Miller is said to have told Woodward that he wasn’t aware that Putin and the former president had spoken since 2021 and Joe Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines “carefully hedged” the question, telling Woodward: “I would not purport to be aware of all contacts with Putin. I wouldn’t purport to speak to what President Trump may or may not have done.”
The book suggests Biden has a very different relationship with the Russian leader. Woodward quotes the president as saying to Oval Office advisors after the Ukraine invasion: “That fucking Putin. Putin is evil. We are dealing with the epitome of evil.”
War, said to be based on hundreds of hours of interviews with first-hand witnesses, also claims that Biden’s national security team at one point believed there was a 50% chance that Putin would use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
The Trump campaign responded to leaked excerpts of the book with fury.
“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. Woodward is an angry, little man,” said Steven Cheung, campaign communications director. “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. Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally, and he’s slow, lethargic, incompetent and overall a boring person with no personality.”
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