House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he thinks Russia “pays” Donald Trump during a private conversation with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill last year, according to a report.

“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) can be heard saying in a recording of the June 15, 2016, exchange, according to the Washington Post.

“Swear to God,” McCarthy added, while his colleagues reportedly laughed.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who was one of several lawmakers in attendance, asked the people at the meeting to keep the congressman’s comments to themselves.

“No leaks,” Ryan told his Republican lieutenants, according to the Post.

“This is how we know we’re a real family here,” he said.

McCarthy, who is one of the president’s closest allies in Congress, had been referring to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), a noted defender of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.

He later claimed that his assertion was simply a “bad attempt at a joke.”

“That’s all there is to it,” McCarthy told reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday night.

“No one believes it to be true from any stretch of fact,” he said.

McCarthy’s aides, who initially blasted the report and insisted it was wrong, had been defending the lawmaker because they didn’t remember the conversation transpiring, he said.

“You don’t have a sense of humor anymore?” McCarthy asked while leaving the House floor. “People aren’t supposed to be able to laugh?”

The congressman’s comments last year came just one day after The Post reported that Russian hackers had infiltrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee.

In response to the audio tape, a Ryan spokesperson also claimed that McCarthy had been joking at the time.

“This entire year-old exchange was clearly an attempt at humor,” spokesperson Brendan Buck told The Post. “No one believed the majority leader was seriously asserting that Donald Trump or any of our members were being paid by the Russians.”

Regardless, the recording serves as proof that Republican leaders in the House were discussing Trump’s relationship with Putin behind closed doors.

Former House Republican Conference policy director Evan McMullin, who took part in the chat last year and is a fervent anti-Trumper, confirmed the conversation with McCarthy and claimed Ryan tried keeping it under wraps for months.

“It’s true that Majority Leader McCarthy said that he thought candidate Trump was on the Kremlin’s payroll,” McMullin told The Post. “Speaker Ryan was concerned about that leaking.”

During the recording, McCarthy reportedly was speaking with Ryan, Republican Conference Chairman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), the deputy whip, among others.

The group had been discussing the possibility of Russia waging a “propaganda war” across Europe, and how the US was not taking a “strong stand” against it, according to the Post.

“The Russians hacked the DNC and got the opp [opposition] research that they had on Trump,” McCarthy reportedly said, laughing.

He then made his alleged comments about whom Putin pays — saying, “There’s two people … there’s two people.”

With Post wires