Former President Donald Trump on Sunday denied a new report that detailed his interactions with Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt, including sharing sensitive U.S. national security information with him.
“The Failing New York Times story, leaked by Deranged Jack Smith and the Biden ‘Political Opponent Abuser’ DOJ, about a red haired weirdo from Australia, named Anthony Pratt, is Fake News,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social account.
Trump continued, “I never spoke to him about Submarines, but I did speak to him about creating jobs in Ohio and Pennsylvania, because that’s what I’m all about.”
The report by the New York Times recounted Pratt’s attempts to have a close relationship with Trump, especially after he became a member of his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. The Times quoted from private comments that Pratt recorded on tape in which he recalled what Trump had said to him. Some of those recordings, captured while Trump was president, aired during a segment on “60 Minutes Australia” on Sunday.
Pratt, for example, described a conversation he had with Trump in late 2019 after he ordered a military strike on Iraq, which Pratt said hadn’t even appeared on the news yet.
“He said, ‘I just bombed Iraq today and the president of Iraq called me up and said, you just leveled my city,'” Pratt said on the tape about what Trump said to him. “And he said, ‘I said to him, okay, what are you gonna do about it?'”
An audio recording Pratt made also recounted when Trump alluded to the infamous phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which he pressured him to open an investigation into Joe Biden, which led to the House impeaching the president.
“Trump said, ‘You know that Ukraine phone call? That was nothing compared to what I usually do,'” Pratt said. “And he said, ‘That Ukraine phone call, that’s nothing compared to what we usually talk about.'”
Pratt said in a recording that Trump knows exactly what to say and what not to say to avoid jail, but gets so close to it that “it looks to everyone like he’s breaking the law.”
“Like he won’t go up to someone and say, ‘I want you to kill someone,'” Pratt said. “He’ll say, he’ll send someone, to tell someone, to kill someone.”
In early October, a pair of reports said that Trump allegedly shared sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with Pratt during an April 2021 conversation at the Palm Beach golf club.
Prosecutors from special counsel Jack Smith’s office and FBI agents have twice interviewed Pratt this year about the discussion, according to ABC News. Pratt could be among more than 80 people whom prosecutors from Smith’s office have identified as potential witnesses who could testify at Trump’s trial that’s slated to begin in May in Fort Pierce, Fla., in the classified documents case.
The special counsel’s office declined to comment on the latest reports revealing Pratt’s recordings.
NBC News has also reached out to Pratt Industries, a cardboard company where the billionaire serves as executive global chairman.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
