Denials out of the Kremlin sync with denials from Donald Trump‘s camp about the alleged post-presidency phone calls between Trump at Mar-a-Lago and Russian President Vladimir Putin that are reported in Bob Woodward‘s forthcoming book War.
Woodward’s source suggested that the two men had spoken as many as seven times during Joe Biden‘s presidency, with a portion of those calls occurring after Russia had invaded Ukraine, an American ally.
[NOTE: The Kremlin phone call denials came as Russia confirmed another newsworthy detail from Woodward’s book — that during the early days of the COVID pandemic Trump sent COVID testing resources to Putin for his personal use at a time when Americans were struggling to contain the virus and testing technology was hard to acquire.]
[NOTE: An alleged surreptitious relationship between Trump and Putin dates back at least to the beginnings of Trump’s political emergence, when a consensus among American intelligence agencies found that Russia worked to influence the 2016 American election in favor of Trump. But investigations into alleged collusion between Trump and Russia, including the Mueller Report, concluded without delivering actionable proof that Trump worked with the Russians in a criminal capacity, even if he did receive the fruits of their election interference labors.]
The Kremlin denial of the alleged post-presidency phone calls between Trump and Putin aren’t likely to staunch suspicion about the relationship, especially with Trump accused of harboring sensitive U.S. classified documents at his place of residence during the same time period when he is alleged to participated in multiple conversations with Putin.
Addressing the purported Trump-Putin calls, Alexander Vindman, retired United States Army lieutenant colonel and Trump-era Director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council (NSC) — who was a key figure in the first Trump impeachment — suggested it is “reasonable there is a recording of these calls in an exquisite intel program.”
Trump’s @realDonaldTrump 7 meetings with Putin…
It is reasonable there is a recording of these calls in an exquisite intel program. Trump would not be the target of the collection, but because Putin is a high-value target, Trump would be caught in the collection. The Russians… pic.twitter.com/7SkTEAbZqM
— Alexander S. Vindman (@AVindman) October 8, 2024
[NOTE: “Exquisite” is an intel term implying info obtained from a (technically) sophisticated source or platform.]
Vindman is quick to note, perhaps in light of Trump’s unproven but repeated accusations about his 2016 campaign being spied on by U.S. intelligence agencies, that such exquisite intelligence would have been collected not because of a program of Trump surveillance but because of Putin’s status as a “high-value target.”
In other words, monitoring Putin’s conversations — where American intel was able — would have turned up his conversations with anyone from Trump to Xi Jinping to his chauffeur.