Donald Trump defiantly said Tuesday that he won’t discuss whether he’s spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin since leaving the White House in 2021 but then said it would be a “smart thing” and a “good thing” if he had.

In an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait during an event at the Economic Club of Chicago, the journalist asked Trump directly if he’d had conversations with the Kremlin leader after leaving the White House ― something a new book alleges he’s done multiple times.

“Well, I don’t comment on that, but I will tell you that if I did, it’s a smart thing,” Trump said. “If I’m friendly with people, if I 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.”

When Micklethwait told Trump it sounded “very much like you did talk to [Putin],” Trump remained evasive.

“I don’t talk about that,” said the Republican presidential nominee.

The questions about what kind of relationship Trump may have maintained with Putin surfaced last week after CNN published details from a new book by famed reporter Bob Woodward. According to the book, “War,” which was released Tuesday, a Trump aide told Woodward that there had been “maybe as many as seven” phone calls between the two men since Trump left the White House. The aide also told Woodward he was once asked to leave a room at Trump’s Florida residence so that the former president could have a private phone call with Putin.

Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung slammed the book as a fabrication, saying “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.”

The book also alleges that Trump sent Putin a secret shipment of COVID-19 testing equipment at the height of the pandemic in 2020, when tests were in short supply.