White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told Breitbart News on Thursday night that if North Korea is serious in its response to President Donald Trump canceling their summit, then the White House looks forward to hearing from the highest levels of the North Korean government.
President Trump announced Thursday morning he was canceling his June 12 summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore. The White House released a letter that Trump had penned to Kim that morning, communicating that the summit was canceled, thanked Kim for releasing hostages to the United States, and told Kim to call or write if he changes his mind with regard to the summit.
A senior administration official later briefed reporters on several instances of broken promises from North Korea that led President Trump to make the decision to cancel. The decision was made after Trump was briefed on a threatening statement from North Korea and after he spoke with top advisers. He also took into consideration that a U.S. advance delegation arrived in Singapore last week and, despite North Korea’s pledge to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that they would send a delegation there to meet with the U.S. delegation and work out logistical details of the upcoming summit, the North Koreans never showed up. The official said that North Korea simply stopped picking up the phone.
Thursday evening, eastern time, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan issued a statement that called Trump’s cancelation of the summit “unexpected” and expressed “a willingness to sit down at any time, in any way, to solve the problem.” The statement also read in part, that cancelation of the talks showed, “how grave the status of historically deep-rooted hostile North Korea-U.S. relations is and how urgently a summit should be realized to improve ties.”
In response to the statement from North Korea, Sanders told Breitbart News, “As the President said in his letter to Chairman Kim, dialogue between the two is the only dialogue that matters. If North Korea is serious, then we look forward to hearing from them at the highest levels.”
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