Nearly two weeks ago, media reported that Donald Trump reportedly revealed information about U.S. nuclear submarine capabilities to Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt. And on Sunday, 60 Minutes Australia played recordings of secret tapes where Pratt disclosed other non-public information Trump shared with him, including information about U.S. military operations in Iraq and Trump’s conversations with the presidents of Iraq and Ukraine.
According to Pratt, Trump shared a lot with him, such as information about U.S. bombings in Iraq before they were publicly reported. “I hadn’t even heard it, it hadn’t even been on the news yet, and he said, ‘I just bombed Iraq today,’” Pratt said Trump told him.
“He’s outrageous. He just says whatever the fuck he wants, and he loves to shock people,” Pratt, a businessman with a reported net worth of $9 billion, said of Trump. Pratt is listed as a potential witness to testify against Trump in a case brought by special counsel Jack Smith regarding his mishandling of classified information, and he reportedly shared information with prosecutors about Trump revealing to him sensitive intelligence regarding U.S. nuclear submarines, including how many warheads the subs usually carry and how close they could get to Russian submarines before they are detected.
Pratt also bragged on tape that Trump shared with him some of the contents of a private conversation with then-president of Iraq Barham Salih. According to Pratt: “[Trump] said, ‘I just bombed Iraq today, and the president of Iraq called me up and said, ‘You just leveled my city.’ And I said to him, ‘OK, what are you going to do about it?’”
Former National Security Advisor John Bolton told 60 Minutes Australia that the conversations Pratt described are “typical Trump behavior” and said that announcements of military operations are usually delayed “so that we can be sure that those who carried it out are back safe home.”
According to the tapes, Pratt said that Trump also discussed his phone call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump attempted to blackmail Zelensky into manufacturing dirt on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, which ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment. “He said, ‘That Ukraine phone call, that’s nothing compared to what we usually talk about,” Pratt said on the recording.
The billionaire said of Trump, “He knows exactly what to say and what not to say so that he avoids 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.’ He’ll say, he’ll send someone, to tell someone, to kill someone.”
Pratt also revealed information Trump shared about demeaning behavior toward his wife, Melania. In the recordings, Pratt said Trump told him, “I asked Melania to walk around the pool in a bikini so all the other guys could get a look at what they were missing.”
But Melania fired back, according to Pratt. “Then Melania said back to him, ‘I’ll do that when you walk around with me in your bikini.’”
Pratt, a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, courted Trump to garner influence, even paying an inflated cost of $1 million on tickets to a the Palm Beach club’s New Year’s Eve gala — far above the actual $50,000 cost per ticket, a witness told prosecutors, according to The New York Times. Pratt also tried to get close to Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, paying him almost a million dollars to attend Pratt’s 60th birthday. The appearance was later cancelled due to Covid, but Pratt said on the recording that Guiliani calls him regularly. “Now he rings me once a week,” the Times reported Pratt as saying on the recordings.
“Rudy is someone that I hope will be useful one day,” Pratt said on tape. “Plus I just think he’s cool. It’s not all just sort of like seat of the pants shit. I think that [Trump] and Rudy are like that, and they’re plotting all this out.”
Pratt continued, explaining his reasoning for cozying up to the then-president and his allies: “All of these guys are like the mafia. Trump, Rupert [Murdoch], Rudy. You want to be a customer, not a competitor.”
Bolton agreed that Trump “talks like a mafioso,” giving the example of an indirect kind of threat that Trump or a mafia boss might make: “That’s a nice little business you’ve got there, it’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”