Caroline Conejero
New York
Tuesday, October 8, 2024, 10:22 p.m.
Former President Donald Trump has maintained secret contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom he has spoken up to seven times and has maintained a confidential relationship since leaving the White House in 2021. This is stated in the new book by journalist Bob Woodward. “War”, his fourth work of political investigation since Trump won the presidency in 2016, in which he reveals that Trump sent Putin, also secretly, Covid-19 tests for his personal use during the hardest moment of the pandemic in 2020.
Although Russia and the US exchanged medical equipment at the time, Putin, Woodward writes, asked Trump to keep the personal shipment of Covid tests a secret, to prevent people from becoming angry at the former president.
The investigative journalist’s new post contains previously unpublished details about the former president’s relationship with the Kremlin leader, including a moment at Mar-a-Lago in which he told a high-ranking aide to leave the room so he could make a “private phone call.” According to the witness, there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, perhaps as many as seven.
The renowned investigative journalist, known for a long history of breaking exclusive stories on American presidents and those around them, documents Joe Biden’s candid, often profane, assessments of world leaders.
“War,” due out Oct. 15, also reveals that U.S. intelligence believed it was much more likely that Russia could use a nuclear weapon to gain an advantage in Ukraine than previously known.
Fear of an atomic war increased in September 2022, when Russia became clear that it would not triumph easily in Ukraine. US intelligence services, which had learned of Moscow’s invasion plans months before Russian troops crossed the border, believed that the probability that Vladimir Putin would order the use of a tactical nuclear weapon had increased by 50%. .
Curse the enemy
The book also reveals little-known aspects about President Biden, such as his habit of privately cursing and insulting his political rivals. “That damn Putin… Putin is evil. “We are dealing with the epitome of evil,” Woodward writes of Biden.
The account of the journalist’s extensive investigation shows Biden’s growing private frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he calls a “damn liar” and a “bad guy.” “That son of a bitch, ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, is a bad guy. “He’s a bad guy!” Biden said earlier this year, as Israel’s invasion of Gaza progressed.
In the course of another interaction during a phone call in April, Biden asked Netanyahu: “What’s your strategy, man?”, to which Netanyahu responded: “we have to get into Rafah.” Biden told her: “Bibi, you have no strategy.”
Woodward’s account offers a rare window into the tense recent talks between the two leaders as Israel escalated its bloody war in Gaza. The dialogues, which are not wasted, show President Biden, more energetic in his confrontation with Netanyahu than he has shown in public in recent months, while revealing in real time the political maneuvering of the Israeli prime minister.
In another exchange, Biden tells his advisers: “I know (Netanyahu) is going to do something, but the way I limit him is by telling him ‘do nothing.'”
As the war continued to escalate, Biden’s frustration boiled over. In a book preview of another private conversation, Biden called Netanyahu a “damn liar” after Israel entered Rafah, Woodward writes. “Bibi, what the fuck?” Biden yelled at Netanyahu in July after an Israeli airstrike killed a top Hezbollah military commander and three civilians in Beirut, according to Woodward.
“You know that the perception of Israel around the world is increasingly that it is an illegal state, a rogue actor,” Biden told Netanyahu, who responded that the target was “one of the main terrorists.” “We saw an opportunity and we took advantage of it,” Netanyahu said. “The harder you hit, the more successful you will be in the negotiation.”
The Trump campaign has responded furiously to the new revelations with a wave of harsh personal attacks against the veteran investigative journalist, accusing him of fabricating and falsifying reality.
“Demented and disturbed”
According to the campaign statement, communications director Steven Cheung calls Woodward a “demented and disturbed” man who suffers from a “debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.” “A small, angry man,” the statement continued, “clearly upset” by Trump’s lawsuit against Woodward for the “unauthorized release of recordings” in his latest book about the former president.
According to the campaign, Trump did not grant the journalist any access to information he recorded in voluntary conversations for his book.
The flurry of insults leaves no room for subtlety: “this trash book belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or it’s used as toilet paper.”
And regarding Woodward, the campaign calls him “a complete scoundrel who has lost mental control, is slow, lethargic, incompetent and, in general, a boring person with no personality.”
Woodward achieved national recognition with his journalistic investigation, along with his Washington Post colleague, Carl Bernstein, into the Watergate scandal that sank Richard Nixon’s presidency.
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