Former U.S. President Donald Trump has had as many as seven private phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin since leaving office and secretly sending him the COVID-19 test machine in the height of the pandemic, a new book written by Bob Woodward, a journalist, revealed.

In the new book on “War,” Mr Woodward stated that Mr Trump instructed one of his aides to leave the office at Florida Resort so he could have a private chat with Mr Putin in 2024.

The unidentified aide said the two might have spoken a half-dozen other times since Mr Trump left the White House.

Mr Woodward, who rose to fame with his Watergate reporting and regularly produces best-selling books with explosive reporting based on access to high-level sources, attributed his account of the continuing communications between Messrs Trump and Putin to an anonymous aide of the former U.S. president.

According to the book, Mr Putin, who has been described as particularly anxious about being infected at the time, told the former U.S. president not to tell anyone as people would kick against the gesture and could damage him politically.

“I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Mr Putin was quoted in the book. It said Mr Trump was unconcerned about people knowing about it before agreeing not to tell anyone.

The disclosure has raised new questions about Mr Trump’s relationship with Mr Putin just weeks before an election that will determine whether the former president will reclaim the White House.

There was no immediate independent confirmation on Tuesday, but Mr Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, described the report as “made-up stories.”

Mr Cheung said the book is a work of fiction that could double as toilet paper.

“None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” he said in a statement.

“President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue.

“Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally, and he’s slow, lethargic, incompetent, and overall a boring person with no personality,” Mr Cheung said.