Trump ‘sent Covid tests to Putin for personal use’ and told him to keep it a secret as he didn’t want people to get ‘mad at him’
Donald Trump secretly slipped Vladimir Putin some American Covid tests for his personal use, a bombshell new book has claimed.
Trump allegedly supplied the Kremlin with tests – which, at the time, were in short supply – to be used by the Russian premier at the height of the Covid pandemic.
The book, War, by veteran American journalist Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate scandal, said a former Trump aide had told him about the hushed-up shipment.
Woodward said that Putin had warned Trump not to reveal that he had supplied the tests over fears of a public backlash in the US.
In the book, he writes that the Russian leader told Trump: “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”
Trump has – and continues to – come under fire for his links to Putin, and Woodward writes how the two leaders held a phone call as recently as early this year, just as Trump’s successor Joe Biden was sending more weapons to Ukraine.
“War” alleges that Trump has secretly maintained a close relationship with the Russian President since leaving the White House in January 2021.
Regardless, in public, Trump has made headline-grabbing claims about Putin – telling GB News the latter “would not have invaded Ukraine” had he still been in office.
The book claims that the pair have spoken as many as seven times – prompting its author to conclude that Trump is a worse President than even Richard Nixon, who resigned over Watergate.
LATEST ON DONALD TRUMP:
Donald Trump pledges that the US will ‘reach Mars’ if he’s re-electedDonald Trump ‘making inroads’ for US election victory if he can control ONE thingNigel Farage: ‘US election defeat would mean the end for Donald Trump’
“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history – and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024,” Woodward wrote.
The book has also brought fresh details to light about the outgoing Biden’s approach to world leaders.
Behind closed doors, the 81-year-old incumbent president is accused of describing Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu as a “son of a b***h” and a “bad f**king guy”.
In public, Biden has remained a staunch supporter of Netanyahu in his war against Hamas.
Woodward also reveals that Biden believed that, at one point in the Ukraine war, there was a 50 per cent chance that Putin would use nuclear weapons on the battlefield – and had intelligence as early as October 2021, four months before Russia’s so-called “special military operation”, which suggested Putin was planning to invade Ukraine.
Some of the intelligence obtained by the Biden administration, Woodward writes, reportedly came from a spy run by the US intelligence services inside the Kremlin.
Biden is said to have described Putin as “the epitome of evil” behind closed doors.
But Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, has denied the account of his man’s relationship with Putin, and claimed Trump had given the reporter “no access”.
“None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true,” he said.