The Kremlin confirmed that former US President Donald Trump while in office sent Russian President Vladimir Putin Covid-19 testing devices during the height of the pandemic, as recounted in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the tests had been sent, but denied the book’s claim that the two leaders had spoken by phone several times since Trump left office.
“We also sent equipment at the beginning of the pandemic,” Peskov said in a written response when asked about the book. “But about the phone calls — it’s not true.”
The book from the renowned journalist of Watergate fame reports that Trump, while president in 2020, secretly sent Abbott Covid testing machines to Putin when the devices were scarce, according to CNN.
In a statement earlier Tuesday, the Trump campaign pushed back on the allegations, saying “none of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true” and accusing the journalist of bias.
“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,” Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, wrote in a statement.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris sought to capitalize on the book’s reporting.
“That is just the most recent, stark example of who Donald Trump is,” Harris said Tuesday in an interview on The Howard Stern Show.
The vice president said people were “scrambling to get these kits” during the pandemic, adding, “And this guy who is president of the United States is sending them to Russia, to a murderous dictator, for his personal use?”
“I believe that Donald Trump has this desire to be a dictator,” Harris said. “He admires strong men, and he gets played by them because he thinks that they’re his friends and they are manipulating him full-time, and manipulating him by flattery and with favor.”
President Joe Biden also criticized Trump over the report during a fundraiser for Democratic Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania on Tuesday evening.
“Those tests to tell you whether you had Covid were in short supply, so he called his good friend, Putin, not a joke, to make sure he had the tests,” Biden said. “What’s wrong with this guy?”
Trump’s relationship with Putin has become a target for Democrats, including Harris and Biden, looking to cast the Republican presidential nominee as too cozy with dictators and jeopardizing the security of the US and its allies.
Trump has long boasted about his relationship with Putin, including by claiming that he could broker an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine if he’s elected again to the White House, without detailing how he would accomplish that.
The former president has assailed Biden over Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war with Hamas in the Middle East, saying they would not have happened if the Republican was still in office.