Trump’s Changing Views on Talking to Foreign Leaders

The former president, who once pushed to prosecute a former secretary of state for talking with foreign officials, said that it would be “a good thing” for himself to have secretly kept in touch with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — if he did.

When he was president, Donald J. Trump grew incensed that former Secretary of State John Kerry still talked with foreign officials after leaving office — so much so, in fact, that he tried to have Mr. Kerry thrown in prison.

Now Mr. Trump is under a harsh spotlight over reports that he did what he once considered a crime.

Mr. Trump’s possible contacts with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia since departing the White House have put him on the other side of the line that he used to call a betrayal of the United States. But while he repeatedly excoriated Mr. Kerry for speaking with Iranian officials back in the day, Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that it would be “a good thing” for him to have stayed in touch with Mr. Putin.

The former president and current Republican nominee did not explicitly acknowledge talking with Mr. Putin over the past four years, as reported in a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward. But he did not dispute it, either, when asked during an appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday, seeming to suggest that he might in fact have communicated with the leader of the Kremlin despite adamant denials issued by his own campaign staff just last week.

“Can you say, yes or no, whether you have talked to Vladimir Putin since you stopped being president?” asked John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News, who was interviewing him onstage.

“Well, I don’t comment on that, but I will tell you that if I did, it’s a smart thing,” Mr. Trump responded. “If I’m friendly with people, if I can have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing in terms of a country. He’s got 2,000 nuclear weapons and so do we.”

Mr. Micklethwait said, “That sounds very much like you did talk to him.”

“No, I don’t talk about that,” Mr. Trump replied.

Mr. Trump’s comments once again put his relationship with the Russian leader at issue, with three weeks left in his campaign to reclaim his former office. While it is not uncommon for former presidents to talk with foreign leaders, it would be unusual for one to be in touch with an adversary like Mr. Putin in the middle of a war, especially without coordinating with the current White House or State Department, or even disclosing it.

In his new book, “War,” copies of which were obtained by news outlets last week in advance of its publication on Tuesday, Mr. Woodward reported that an unidentified Trump aide told him that the former president had spoken with Mr. Putin multiple times since leaving office, perhaps as many as seven times.

Mr. Woodward also reported that Mr. Trump, while president early in the pandemic in 2020, agreed to send what was then rare Covid-19 testing equipment to Russia for Mr. Putin’s personal use. Mr. Putin urged Mr. Trump not to disclose the gift for fear that “people will get mad at you,” according to the book.

Mr. Trump’s campaign issued a statement last week disputing Mr. Woodward’s reporting. “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true,” Steven Cheung, the campaign communications director, said in the statement. Since then, however, the Kremlin has confirmed that Mr. Trump sent testing equipment, even as it denied that Mr. Putin had spoken with the former president.

Mr. Trump has long expressed admiration for Mr. Putin despite the Russian president’s record of domestic oppression, foreign aggression and hostility to the United States. He said it was “very smart” of Mr. Putin to invade Ukraine in 2022, criticized U.S. military aid for Ukraine and said that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies with inadequate military budgets.

While president, Mr. Trump went after Mr. Kerry for talking with Iranian officials about preserving the nuclear agreement that the former diplomat had negotiated under President Barack Obama and that Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of. Mr. Trump called it a violation of the Logan Act, a 1799 statute barring private citizens from interfering in diplomatic relations with foreign governments. “Frankly, he should be prosecuted on that,” Mr. Trump told reporters in 2019.

The Logan Act, however, has never been successfully prosecuted and is considered unconstitutional by some scholars. But that did not deter Mr. Trump. In meeting after meeting, he repeatedly badgered Attorney General William P. Barr to charge Mr. Kerry.

At the behest of the Justice Department, Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney for New York, spent a year determining whether there could be a case, but concluded it was a bogus prosecution, as he put it in a later memoir.

Unwilling to take no for an answer, the Justice Department then assigned another U.S. attorney, Robert K. Hur from Maryland, to look into Mr. Kerry, only to have him reach the same conclusion. But that never satisfied Mr. Trump. “As long as Trump is president, and probably thereafter, he will search for a lawyer willing to prosecute Kerry,” John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser, wrote in his own memoir.