New details of the meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Mike Pompeo, newly confirmed secretary of state, came out in a Thursday morning Fox and Friends live phone interview with President Donald Trump.
Trump also hinted at how a meeting with the North Korean leader may or may not go.
“It could be that I walk out quickly, with respect, but it could be. It could be that maybe the meeting doesn’t even take place. Who knows? But I can tell you right now, they want to meet,” said President Trump. “The nuclear war would have happened if you had weak people. We had weak people.”
“This should have been settled long before I came into office. This is a much different ball game than if they did it five or ten or twenty years ago,” said Trump. “This is a much more dangerous ball game now.”
The U.S. President said the meeting between Kim and Pompeo, who has been serving as CIA director, lasted more than an hour and was not originally on Pompeo’s schedule for the North Korea visit.
Trump said there are photos of the meeting and that the meeting was arranged while Pompeo was already in North Korea, where he met with North Korean counterparts. He added that Pompeo and Kim got along and had a “great meeting.”
U.S. officials have been working on a proposed meeting between Trump and Kim on the issue of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. Trump had previously said the target date for a meeting was May or June.
During the Thursday morning interview, he said there were five locations under consideration for the meeting between himself and North Korea’s Kim.
The White House has confirmed that North Korea is open to denuclearization in the talks. This week, South Korean newswire service Yonhap reported that Kim announced, “From April 21, North Korea will stop nuclear tests and launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles.” Kim’s statement continued, “The North will shut down a nuclear test site in the country’s northern side to prove the vow to suspend nuclear test.”
Should the meeting between Trump and Kim come to fruition, it would be the first meeting between a U.S. president and a Kim dynasty leader since Kim Il-sung’s 1948 founding of the communist state.
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