- In leaked audio, a billionaire donor claims Donald Trump made an off-color remark about Melania.
- The donor said Trump asked his wife to wear a bikini at Mar-a-Lago to make his friends jealous.
In recently leaked audio recordings, the Australian billionaire donor Anthony Pratt can be heard saying former President Donald Trump made an off-color remark about his wife, Melania.
Pratt's relationship with Trump has gotten significant attention this month after reports emerged that Trump had been accused of sharing sensitive information with Pratt while president.
The audio recordings were obtained in an investigation by Australia's "60 Minutes," The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age and included Pratt describing an interaction he said he'd had with the Trumps at a dinner party.
Pratt said he was seated next to the Trumps at dinner when Donald Trump remarked: "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."
Pratt said that, in response, Melania Trump quipped: "I'll do that when you walk around with me in your bikini."
It's unclear when the dinner party took place or whom Pratt was speaking with in the recordings. Pratt, who's the chairman of the global paper and packaging company Visy, is a paying member of Mar-a-Lago, the apparent setting of the "pool" in Trump's comments.
Trump's postpresidency office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
On Truth Social, though, he railed against The New York Times' reporting on his conversations with Pratt, whom he called a "red haired weirdo from Australia."
He wrote: "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."
Anonymous sources told ABC News that Pratt alleged in interviews with federal investigators that Trump had shared information with him about US nuclear submarines in about April 2021.
The unnamed sources said this information pertained to the number of nuclear warheads US submarines could carry and how close they could get to a Russian submarine without detection.
John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor, who took responsibility for the recent audio leaks, indicated in an interview with Australia's "60 Minutes" that he was not surprised by Pratt's significant access to Trump.
"I think Trump was trying to impress him. 'Well, you may be a billionaire, but I'm a multibillionaire and, besides, I'm president and I know things you don't,'" he told "60 Minutes." "I do think that's very typical Trump behavior."
The audio recordings also include Pratt alleging that Trump had shared sensitive information with him on several other occasions.
One such incident, Pratt claimed, was a 2019 phone call in which Trump told him about ordering airstrikes in Iraq.