As is usually the case in Bob Woodward’s books, there’s no shortage of striking elements in the longtime journalist’s upcoming book, titled “War.” But it’s the portions about Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin that are clearly causing a stir.

To briefly summarize, Woodward’s book alleges that the former Republican president, while in office, secretly sent Covid testing equipment to Putin at the height of the pandemic, even as people in his own country struggled to gain access to such resources. The book, citing a source close to Trump, also claims that the former president and the Russian leader have had direct conversations “as many as seven times” since he left the White House.

Trump has been out of office for roughly 45 months, so if the two have spoken seven times, that works out to be an average of one undisclosed chat roughly every six months.

To be sure, the GOP candidate and the Kremlin have insisted that these chats did not happen. Then again, when it comes to the broader Trump/Putin scandal, both the former president and the Kremlin have made other denials that later fell apart under scrutiny.

But the former president’s running mate approached the story in a different way. As NBC News reported:

Asked about Woodward’s claims, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, said Tuesday, “I honestly didn’t know that Bob Woodward was still alive until you asked me that question.” He went on to knock Woodward as a “hack” and said that even if the reporting is true, “Look, is there something wrong with speaking to world leaders? No. Is there anything wrong with engaging in diplomacy?”

At first blush, part of this defense might seem vaguely persuasive. Trump stands accused of having multiple conversations with a foreign official, but Trump has already had plenty of other conversations with plenty of other foreign officials. So, some might ask, what’s the big deal?

Part of the problem is that the Trump/Putin chats, if real, were kept secret from the public. Another part of the problem is that there were also a series of other secret Trump/Putin chats that reportedly occurred during the Republican’s presidency, making the larger context worse.

There’s also the overarching question for which there is no obvious answer: Why would a former American president feel the need to communicate with Russia’s autocratic leader seven times after leaving office?

And then, of course, there’s the legal dimension to keep in mind. As a Washington Post analysis explained, “Outside of any previous context, that a candidate for president should speak privately with a foreign adversary more than a half-dozen times is striking. There is federal legislation, including the Logan Act, that prohibits certain interactions between U.S. citizens and foreign actors.”

Trump might pretend not to know anything about the Logan Act, but we already know better: During the Republican’s term, he not only expressed outrage when U.S. officials interacted with foreign officials without coordinating with his administration, he even went so far as to talk about charging former Secretary of State John Kerry with a crime.

Indeed, in 2019, the then-president — who routinely tried to get the Justice Department to prosecute political figures he disliked — insisted that Kerry “should be prosecuted” for violating the Logan Act, adding: “He’s talking to Iran and … has many meetings and many phone calls and he’s telling them what to do. That is a total violation of the Logan Act.”

Trump had no idea what he was talking about, and Kerry never faced charges.

That said, The New York Times reported just a few weeks ago that Trump actually demanded a federal investigation into Kerry — and got one.

In fact, the Times’ research discovered that immediately after the then-president’s hysterics, “Justice Department officials in Washington told prosecutors for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan that they were referring to them an investigation related to Mr. Kerry’s contacts with Iran.” When Trump threw another fit a year later, “a top Justice Department official in Washington called the U.S. attorney’s office in New York to find out why the office was delaying taking an investigative step to look at Mr. Kerry’s personal communications.”

When the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to prosecute the former secretary of state, then-Attorney General Bill Barr took the case to the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland, “where the top prosecutor there came to the same conclusion as the federal prosecutors in New York and declined to charge Mr. Kerry.”

In other words, if the allegations in Woodward’s book are true, it appears Trump and his team went out of their way to have Kerry prosecuted for doing what Trump himself did with his benefactor in Moscow.