Donald Trump has recently come under fire for his purported relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

During a press conference that Trump gave on Wednesday in Florida, he asked Russian hackers to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

In the same press conference, Trump said, “I never met Putin, I don’t know who Putin is. He said one nice thing about me. He said I’m a genius.”

But according to MSNBC, they found an interview from 2012 that has Trump admitting that he not only knows Putin, but that Putin has been observing him.

“I do have a relationship, and I can tell you that he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today,” Trump told MSNBC’s anchor Thomas Roberts.

When Roberts questioned Trump about his relationship with Putin, Trump said, “He’s probably very interested in what you and I are saying today and I’m sure he’s going to be seeing it in some form. But I do have a relationship with him and I think it’s very interesting to see what’s happened.”

Trump then went on to applaud Putin as a president while minimizing President Barack Obama’s leadership skills.

“I mean look, he’s done a very brilliant job in terms of what he represents and what he’s representing,” Trump said. “If you look at what he’s done with Syria, if you look at so many of the different things, he has really eaten our president’s lunch, let’s not kid ourselves.”

When CBS asked Trump about Putin and Russia on Wednesday, Trump claimed, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”

Republican strategist and Trump campaign proxy, told Roberts that the “relationship” Trump was talking about at the time was the fact that Putin was following what he was doing in Moscow.

“Of course the Russian president would notice that somebody of that stature was in Moscow,” he said. “What he said yesterday was that there was no business dealings between in him and Vladimir Putin.”