Seven Phone Calls: Yet More Evidence Trump is Selling America Out to Russia

“Treason is very much a matter of habit.” ― John Le Carré, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy"

In his upcoming book, War, Bob Woodward reports that Donald Trump has remained in phone contact with Vladimir Putin since leaving the White House. While we don’t know the substance of the calls, their mere existence underscores once again how much of a threat the former president is to national security. I have long believed that Trump is much more than a “useful idiot” to Moscow. The latest disclosures only reinforce my thesis.

Before he left office in 2020 — at the height of the COVID pandemic — Woodward reports that Trump sent hard-to-get COVID testing kits to Putin, who was petrified of contracting the disease. “Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump, according to Woodward. Trump replied: “I don’t care. Fine.”

The Washington Post reports an unnamed Trump aide cited in Woodward’s book indicated that his boss may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House. In early 2024, Trump sent the “unnamed aide away from his office at his Mar-a-Lago Club so he could conduct a private phone call with Putin,” according to Woodward’s account.

There is a multi-year pattern here. Last December, I laid out the detailed evidence of Trump’s treason, gleaned from former U.S. and Russian intelligence officials, noted authors and journalists, in “Russia, if you’re listening…” It’s well worth a read. Nut shell proof from when Trump was president:

Utter supineness before Vladimir Putin; secrecy surrounding his meetings with the Russian leader, including excluding U.S. officials, confiscating interpreters’ notes, or relying solely on Putin’s interpreter; Jared Kushner’s effort to establish a secret a communications back channel with the Russian embassy; echoing Putin’s revisionist history regarding Montenegro as a threat, Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine; secretly pursuing building a Trump tower in Moscow while campaigning for president; and his son’s revelation that “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Former NSC official during the Trump administration, Alexander Vindman, posted the following on “X” on Tuesday:

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 definitely have a recording of every call. Seven calls with Putin, including during the full-scale Russia-Ukraine war, helps explains why Trump continues to be an ardent supporter of Russia and such a vocal critic of Ukraine. Trump’s seven calls with Putin also explain why Putin was emboldened to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and sustain more than two years of war. Putin has made a huge investment in Trump and expects that investment to payoff. It’s clear now more than ever that was the decisive factor in convincing Putin to wage a wider war on Ukraine. Trump has taken the world to the brink of Armageddon. A second Trump term would have America — and with it the entire world — go over the precipice. Trump was, is, and will be a clear and present danger to the United States.

As for the COVID test kit conversation, because Trump was still president, standard operating procedure is for NSC staff to prepare a transcript for restricted distribution within the national security bureaucracy. So, unless he ordered that no such record be made, there should be in the archives a transcript of all Trump-Putin conversations done when Trump was president.

U.S. law proscribes spying on American citizens by the intelligence agencies. Law enforcement agencies may do so with a court order. Therefore, it is doubtful that transcripts of private citizen Trump’s conversations with Putin exist in U.S. government databases, though I can’t be 100 percent sure since Putin is at the top tier of hard intel targets; Trump’s identity would be redacted in such a record.

As Vindman points out, however, the Russians have certainly recorded Trump’s discussions with Putin — providing them with yet more grist for kompromat on him, which they have been compiling for decades.

“Russian intelligence gained an interest in Trump as far back as 1977, viewing Trump as an exploitable target,” according to former KGB major Yuri Shvets, who had served in Washington. He claims that Trump became the target of a joint Czech and Russian spying operation after he married his Czech-born first wife, Ivana, in 1977 and has been an asset of Russian intelligence ever since. “The guy is not a complicated cookie, his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This combination makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter,” he added.

Given his record, not least his January 6 attempted putsch, does anyone believe that it would be beneath Donald Trump to be conniving with Putin directly to again try to corrupt the presidential election in his favor?

Woodward concludes in his book that “Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024” and is therefore “unfit to lead the country.”

There are many reasons to make this conclusion, treason not being the least among them.

The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.