Bob Woodward upcoming book: Trump secretly sent Covid tests to Putin in 2020
Donald Trump, while US president, secretly sent Covid-19 tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2020, even as Russia was suffering from a shortage of them, according to a forthcoming book by veteran US journalist Bob Woodward.
Woodward is one of the most prominent journalists with knowledge of the White House secrets.
His name came to prominence after he and his colleague at the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein, exposed the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.
In a book titled “War” excerpts of which were circulated by US media outlets before its scheduled release on October 15, Woodward talks about Trump maintaining a personal relationship with Putin despite the latter’s invasion of Ukraine, at a time when the former Republican president is trying to return to the White House when he runs for president against Democrat Kamala Harris on November 5.
According to the excerpts, Trump sent Putin a package of Covid tests in 2020 at the height of the pandemic.
The Russian president sought to keep the matter under wraps to avoid any political repercussions.
According to Woodward, Putin told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anyone because people will be angry with you, not me”.
Woodward quoted an unnamed Trump aide as saying that the former president had communicated with Putin seven times since the end of his presidential term in early 2021, even though the United States, under Democratic President Joe Biden, is Ukraine’s most prominent political and military supporter in the face of the Russian invasion.
The Washington Post reported in its report on the book that Trump asked one of his aides in early 2024 to leave his office at his Florida resort, Malaga, because he wanted to have a private conversation with the Russian president.
The Trump campaign was quick to deny the book’s content.
“None of these fabricated stories by Bob Woodward are true,” spokesman Stephen Chung told AFP.
“They are the invention of a madman who is out of his mind”.
He thought the book was “good for toilet paper”.
The book briefly touches on Harris’ role as Biden’s vice president, hardly playing an influential role in setting foreign policy, according to the Washington Post.
Asked about the book, Harris told US journalist Howard Stern that Trump was being manipulated during a health disaster that saw hundreds of Americans dying every day.
“Everyone was scrambling to get the test kit, and Trump was sending it to Russia, to a murderous dictator, for his own use”.
Woodward wrote about many US presidents over the past 50 years, and his new book is his fourth since Trump won the presidency in 2016.
The journalist concluded in his new book that Trump’s communication with Putin at a time when he is waging war against a country allied with the United States makes him even more unfit for the presidency than Nixon was.
“Trump has been the most reckless and impulsive president in American history, and he projects the same personality as a presidential candidate in 2024,” Woodward wrote.
