WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — President Donald Trump expressed optimism Wednesday that his planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un can help make the world safer, and he said his envoy, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and Kim have already forged a “good relationship.”
Tweeting in the early morning before a round of golf with visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump confirmed that Pompeo had traveled to North Korea for direct talks, as first reported by The Washington Post.
“Mike Pompeo met with Kim Jong Un in North Korea last week. Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed. Details of Summit are being worked out now. Denuclearization will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea!” Trump wrote.
The meeting was over Easter weekend, not last week.
[Ahead of summit, CIA chief secretly meets with North Korea’s Kim]
Pompeo is Trump’s nominee to become secretary of state. At his confirmation hearing last week, Pompeo expressed optimism about diplomatic overtures to North Korea but did not reveal his own role. He told senators he could envision the future need for a U.S. ground invasion of North Korea should other options to defuse the nuclear standoff fail, but he said he agrees with current U.S. policy against regime change in North Korea.
Trump said Tuesday that he hopes the summit can happen within weeks — most likely in late May or early June — but he also allowed that the meeting might not happen if preparations went wrong.
“Let’s see what happens,” Trump said Tuesday during his first set of meetings with Abe, whose nation has been menaced by North Korean missiles. “We’ll either have a very good meeting or we won’t have a good meeting. And maybe we won’t even have a meeting at all depending on what’s going in.”
[North Korea ready to talk about denuclearization, US officials say]
Trump said five sites are under consideration to hold the session, which would be the first such meeting between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean counterpart. Trump stunned allies and many of his own aides when he agreed on the spot to an offer last month to meet Kim, an absolute ruler whom Trump has mocked as “Little Rocket Man.”
Kim has accelerated his nuclear weapons and missile development since Trump became president, and Kim claims to be able to strike the mainland United States with a nuclear warhead. Trump’s administration has regarded the threat from North Korea as its most pressing national security problem.
“I think that there’s a great chance to solve a world problem,” Trump said Tuesday. “This is not a problem for the United States. It’s not a problem for Japan or any other country. It’s a problem for the world.”
[New Korean conflict could kill 300,000 within days, report says]
In Washington, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, said it was “perfectly natural” to send Pompeo as an envoy, considering the back-channel communications that have existed for years between the U.S. and North Korean agencies.
Corker, who chaired Pompeo’s hearing last week, said he did not know about the trip until The Post reported it Tuesday evening.
“I like the fact that Pompeo met with him,” Corker told reporters Wednesday at a media breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “I hope that a lot of other people will meet with him, and I hope there’s huge amounts of precursor activity that takes place,” ahead of the summit.
Follow the Bangor Daily News on Facebook for the latest Maine news.