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 on his Truth Social account.
He 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 Times report recounted Pratt's attempts to have a close relationship with Trump, especially after he became a member of Trump's 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 the 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 Trump had 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 told 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 phone call in which he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open an investigation into Joe Biden, which led the House to impeach him.
"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 Trump allegedly shared sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with Pratt in an April 2021 conversation at the Palm Beach golf club.
FBI agents and prosecutors from special counsel Jack Smith's office 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 in the classified documents case, which is scheduled to begin in May in Fort Pierce, Florida.
The special counsel's office declined to comment on the latest reports revealing Pratt's recordings.
Pratt Industries, a cardboard company for whom Pratt is the executive global chairman, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
