Trump confirms CIA director met N. Korea’s Kim

Monitoring Desk

WASHINGTON: President Trump confirmed Wednesday that his CIA director has met with North Korea’s leader, one day after acknowledging the U.S. and the North were engaged in talks “at extremely high levels”.

The U.S. and North Korea lack formal diplomatic relations, increasing the significance of the high-level meeting between Mike Pompeo, who has been tapped by Trump to helm the State Department, and Kim.

Trump said Pompeo met with Kim “last week”, saying it “went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed” in a statement he issued on Twitter.

The acknowledgement of the Pompeo-Kim meeting follows the White House’s refusal to confirm reports of the sit-down. The Washington Post first reported the meeting, describing it as laying the groundwork for a historic bilateral between Kim and Trump.

“Details of Summit are being worked out now. Denuclearization will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea!” Trump said.

Originally planned for May, Trump appeared to pad the timeframe on Tuesday, saying it could occur in June “or a little before that”.

“Hopefully that will be a success. Maybe it will be and maybe it won’t be. We don’t know. But we’ll see what happens,” Trump said at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida whe-re he was hosting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

No sitting American president has ever met in person with a North Korean leader, and Trump surprised many last month after he accepted Kim’s offer to meet following months of vitriolic mudslinging between the leaders that repeatedly devolved into threats of extreme violence.

The U.S. has led an international campaign to apply economic pressure on Pyongang in order to curtail its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, which has resulted in some of the most stringent UN sanctions to date. Trump said Tuesday he has given his “blessing” to efforts to end the decades-long war between the North and the South as the neighbors pursue a touch-and-go detente.

Hostilities in the Korean war, which began in 1950, ended three years later with an armistice rather than a formal peace treaty between the principal belligerents, meaning the war technically never ended. The North and South are reporting mulling an official end to the conflict and could make an announcement during a joint summit planned for next week.

Addressing the warming ties between the North and South, Trump said the countries “wouldn’t be discussing anything” without him. (AA)