WATCH: Trump says he 'never met Putin' -- despite bragging about meeting him just last year

The Democrats this week have been hammering Donald Trump over his past praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his campaign manager Paul Manafort's connections to the Kremlin.

Now that security experts say it's likely that Russian intelligence agencies were behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee, Democrats have once again called on Trump to release his tax returns to prove that he doesn't have ties to Russia.

In an interview with Florida news station CBS4 Miami, Trump denied he had any business dealings with Russia and even went so far as to say that he'd never met Putin.

"I have nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do, I never met Putin, I have nothing to do with Russia whatsoever," he told the station.

This is interesting because during a debate last year, Trump explicitly said that he'd met Putin while the two of them were set to appear on 60 Minutes.

"I got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes, we were stablemates," said Trump at the time.

Additionally, The Hill notes that Donald Trump Jr. told a 2008 real estate conference that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets."

Trump could help clear a lot of this up by releasing his last ten years' worth of tax returns, but he keeps refusing to do so because he's purportedly being audited.

Check out CBS4 Miami's interview with Trump below.