Trump Once Boasted About US Nuclear Weapons Putin, Xi 'Have Never Heard About'

Former President Donald Trump once boasted that the United States had nuclear weapons that China's President Xi Jinping and Russia's President Vladimir Putin "have never heard about," according to an audiobook.

In a December 2019 interview with American journalist and The Washington Post's associate editor Bob Woodward, Trump seemingly revealed that the U.S. had a new nuclear weapons system — information that was likely highly classified.

"I have built a weapons system that nobody's ever had in this country before," Trump told Woodward, according to CNN, which received an excerpt of the journalist's upcoming audiobook, "The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward's Twenty Interviews with President Trump."

"We have stuff that you haven't even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before," Trump added.

Throughout Trump's interviews with Woodward, the former president referenced his relationship with Putin several times, adding that he "campaigned on getting along with Russia." Trump later blamed the FBI's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election for ruining his chances to improve the relationship between the United States and Russia.

According to CNN, the audio also showed how Trump decided to share with Woodward the classified letters from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. He later seemingly acknowledged that the letters were classified and that he should not be showing them around.

"Don't say I gave them to you, okay?" Trump said.

The North Korean leader's letters to Trump were among the documents retrieved by the National Archives from Trump's Mar-a-Lago earlier this year. The agency has accused Trump of improperly removing classified materials from the White House following his exit from the Oval Office in January 2021.

Woodward's recordings appear to contradict Trump's claim that none of the materials he took with him to Mar-a-Lago at the end of his presidential term were sensitive. Trump had also previously asserted that as the U.S. president, he could declassify any sensitive document without going through a formal process simply by saying or thinking that "they are declassified."

Woodward's upcoming audiobook will contain at least 8 hours of audio recordings from his interviews with Trump from 2016 to 2020. The audiobook will be released on Oct. 25.