President Donald Trump landed back in Washington after the sudden collapse of his nuclear summit with Kim Jong Un – after saying in an interview he appreciates that North Korea spent ‘a lot of time’ building up its nuclear arsenal.
In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, conducted in Hanoi before Trump told the world why he failed to reach a deal with the North Korean dictator, Trump said he and Kim did not see eye to eye on what North Korea would have to give up for sanctions relief.
‘Well, they wanted to denuke certain areas and I wanted everything,’ Trump told Hannity.
‘And the sanctions are there and I didn’t want to give up the sanctions unless we had a real program. And they’re not ready for that and I understand that fully, I really do. I mean, they spent a lot of time building it and that doesn’t mean the world has to be happy,’ Trump said.
Sanctions are a major point of leverage, and Trump is reluctant to give it up without seeing more movement from the DPRK. The summit was abruptly ended early Thursday with Trump and the North Korean side giving different accounts of what went wrong. Trump said he decided to walk away because North Korea wanted all sanctions lifted in exchange for closing a major nuclear facility. The North Korean side said they only pushed for the lifting of some.
‘But I wanted them to denuke, and they wouldn’t do the full. They wanted to just some, and I guess a lot of people would have said, that’s a great start. But I just didn’t feel it was right,’ Trump said, characterizing things the same way he did in his presser.
But he had a new batch of adjectives to praise Kim Jong Un, whom he gushed about repeatedly in Hanoi.
‘And he’s a real personality and he’s very smart,’ Trump said of Kim. ‘He’s sharp as you can be, and he’s a real leader, and he’s pretty mercurial. I don’t say that necessarily in a bad way, but he’s a pretty mercurial guy.’
US President Donald Trump disembarks from Air Force One upon arrival at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, February 28, 2019, following a trip to Hanoi, Vietnam, for his second summit with North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un
Trump continued: ‘But he was talking to the press a little bit, and, you know, he’s not big to talking to the press, but the press came in. Look, bottom line, I think he wants to get something done but this wasn’t the right time. And Vietnam, Hanoi, where we are right now, they have treated us so fantastically, so good. They’ve done such a great job.’
He later added: ‘The fact is that he also said he’s not going to do testing, and he said that recently, and he said it again to me just a little while ago. He doesn’t want to do testing. He’s not going to do that. That’s a big thing. No rockets, no anything.’
In another key part of the interview, Trump said longtime lawyer Michael Cohen ‘made a decision’ relating to payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors say ‘Individual 1’ – Trump, directed the payments, which Cohen admitted broke campaign finance laws. Trump denies it, as well as the affair.
Hannity, who was represented by Cohen himself, told Trump: ‘He was never my attorney. He did apologize to me for his attorney saying that in court, and I can tell you personally, he said to me at least a dozen times, that he made the decision on the payments and he didn’t tell you … told me personally.’
‘Yes,’ Trump responded.
‘No, he did. And he made a decision,’ said Trump – indicating that it was Cohen’s plan. Cohen testified that Trump asked him and Trump Organization CEO Allen Wesellberg to work it out.
Meanwhile, a statement from official state-run North Korean news agency KCNA also puts a positive spin on the talks, despite the failure of the two leaders to agree on a joint statement – a signal that talks are likely to continue.
‘The top leaders of the two countries highly appreciated at the one-on-one talks and extended talks that a remarkable progress has been made in the historic course of implementing the Singapore joint statement,’ said the statement, in over-the-top language typical of government-run press accounts.
‘They had a constructive and candid exchange of their opinions over the practical issues arising in opening up a new era of the improvement of the DPRK-U.S. relations on the basis of the progress,’ it continued. ‘At the talks they shared the common understanding that the efforts made by the two sides and proactive measures taken by them to defuse tensions and preserve peace on the Korean peninsula and completely denuclearize it were of great significance in building mutual trust and making a fundamental turn in the decades-long bilateral relations characterized by mistrust and antagonism.
‘The top leaders listened to each other’s views on the issues to be resolved without fail at the present phase in order to carry out the joint goals specified in the Singapore joint statement, and had an in-depth discussion of the ways to do so.’
Trump walked away from a so called ‘bad deal’ with North Korea because he ‘didn’t want to make the same mistake Obama did with Iran’, according to press secretary Sarah Sanders.
She tweeted: ‘President Obama refused to walk away from a bad deal with Iran. President @realDonaldTrump refuses to make the same mistake with Iran, North Korea, or anybody else. President Trump will always put the safety of the American people above politics.’
The White House issued its first statement after North Korean officials made a rare appearance on Thursday — while the president was on his way home from Vietnam — to publicly rebuke him for the breakdown in nuclear talks.
The president looked downbeat as he landed back into Joint Base Andrews in Maryland this evening local time after the summit with the North Korean leader was abruptly ended early without signing a deal.
The nation that tightly controls the media its people consume and does not have any independent news agencies, allowed two top officials to appear before cameras. One of the officials even took questions in Korean after acknowledging an American reporter in English.
It was a slap in the face to Trump, who’d boasted about his ‘great relationship’ with Kim Jong-un at a news conference and cast North Korea as ‘not ready’ to make a deal that he could sign.
In a long statement delivered to the press in Korean, and a translator read aloud in English for Americans watching over lunch, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho contradicted Trump hours later at a midnight news conference.
He said the country asked for ‘partial sanctions’ relief in areas the authoritarian country claims are harming North Korean citizens and affecting their livelihoods. In return, Pyongyang offered to ‘permanently’ close its Plutonium and Uranium facilities in the Yongbyon region in the presence of U.S. inspectors.
Trump landed back into the U.S. this evening local time after he abruptly ended summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi early without signing a deal. Trump continued to tout his ‘warm’ relationship with Kim before North Korean officials made a rare appearance to publicly rebuke him for claims he made about the breakdown in talks
North Korean officials made a rare press appearance on Thursday after President Trump departed Vietnam to publicly dispute aspects of his claims about the breakdown in talks
Sarah Sanders says Trump walked away from a ‘bad deal’ with North Korea because he ‘didn’t want to make the same mistake Obama did with Iran’
He said North Korea asked the U.S. to lift sanctions corresponding with five United Nations resolutions adopted between 2016 and 2017. Ri claimed that his proposal was the ‘biggest’ offer North Korea could make based on the ‘current level of confidence’ between the country and the United States.
Trump claimed Thursday that North Korea was ‘not ready’ to meet the United States’ conditions. Ri said talks broke down when the United States ‘insisted that we should take one more step’ beyond the pledge to abandon Yongbyon.
‘Therefore it became crystal clear that the United States was not ready to accept our proposal,’ he stated.
The U.S. president expressed confidence that an accord could be struck in the future that would see North Korea denuclearize, but Ri told reporters an opportunity to make a better agreement may not present itself: ‘Our principle stand will remain variably and our proposal will never be changed.’
Ri left the media availability without taking questions. His deputy Choe Son-hui did interact with press, and took a question in English from an NBC reporter on Otto Warmbier.
Choe declined to comment on the Ohio college student’s death, however, telling a rowdy group of reporters she would only talk about denuclearization.
In an interview with FOX News Channel’s Hannity, filmed before North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho’s appearance, Trump said: ‘It didn’t quite work out. I would say that I wasn’t satisfied, and perhaps he wasn’t satisfied. Good relationship, but I decided that this wasn’t the right time to sign something.
‘You have to be prepared to walk, and this just wouldn’t have been good for our country. And, frankly, he could look at it the same way. Maybe he can look at it the same way. But we get along really well.
‘He’s a different kind of a guy, and I just said, look, this isn’t going to be working. So, I have feeling something down the line will happen. And it will happen, it will be good.’
North Korean officials made a rare press appearance on Thursday after President Trump departed Vietnam to publicly dispute aspects of his claims about the breakdown in talks
She proceeded to answer questions in Korean for three and a half more minutes before she left the scrum at Melia Hotel in Hanoi
She proceeded to answer questions in Korean for three and a half more minutes before she left the scrum at Melia Hotel in Hanoi that took place nearly ten hours after the summit concluded.
Trump speculated at his own presser that ‘top leadership’ in North Korea did not know about the Warmbier’s arrest and the student’s deteriorating condition. He claimed it wasn’t to Kim’s ‘advantage’ to send the young man, who’d been accused of taking down a propaganda poster, back to the U.S. in a coma.
‘He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word,’ the American president said.
President Donald Trump defended his decision to walk away from his North Korean nuclear summit without a deal in an interview Fox News host Sean Hannity from Vietnam that will air on Thursday evening in the United States
Trump spoke to the press for roughly 40 minutes about his failure to get a deal before flying back to the U.S.,where he touched down just before 2 pm EDT at a base in Alaska.
The president made no mention of Kim in remarks he delivered there to troops, opting for a traditional stump speech on the military, economy and trade, instead.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters riding on Air Force One that the U.S. was aware of North Korea’s claims. She had no statement to share at the time in response to the country’s shocking comments.
Trump had already spoken about his decision to walk away from his North Korean nuclear summit without a deal not just at the news conference, but in a interview from Vietnam with Fox News host Sean Hannity, as well.
The president told Hannity he wasn’t ‘satisfied’ with the outcome of talks, and he suspects that Kim ‘wasn’t satisfied,’ either. He suggested that they left as pals, though, and could someday resume the discussion.
‘We’re working towards something, but we didn’t sign anything today, it didn’t quite work out,’ he told Hannity on Thursday afternoon local time. ‘Good relationship, but I decided this wasn’t the right time to sign something so we’ll see what happens over a period of time.’
The dictator demanded that all sanctions be lifted in return for giving up only some of his nukes, the U.S. president claimed.
‘They wanted to de-nuke certain areas, and I wanted everything. And the sanctions are there and I didn’t want to give up the sanctions unless we had a real program,’ he told Hannity. ‘And they’re not ready for that and I understand that fully, I really do.’
Trump said that the final snag that caused the sudden breakdown was over sanctions — and Kim’s push to have all of them lifted in exchange for a concession Trump and his secretary of state could not live with.
‘Sometimes you have to walk away,’ Trump told reporters at a press conference in Hanoi that was abruptly moved up after the stalled talks.
The president expressed his hope that the two leaders would meet again, but acknowledged: ‘It might be soon, it might not be for a long time. I can’t tell you.’
President Trump abruptly ended talks with Kim Jong-un in Hanoi on Thursday, telling reporters that the North Korean leader had demanded that all sanctions be lifted in return for only getting rid of part of his nuclear stockpile, so he walked away
Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised Kim Jong Un as the ‘big winner’ in the North Korea talks just for getting President Trump to sit down and negotiate
At home, the president received the usual cheering from Republicans like South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham.
Graham suggested that Kim’s days will be numbered if he can’t come to an agreement with Trump.
‘Speaking of Rocket Man, he couldn’t be here. And if he doesn’t get a deal with Trump he won’t be anywhere much longer,’ the U.S. senator said to laughs at a large-scale conservative gathering just outside of Washington. ‘Why is Rocket Man talking to Trump when he’s never talked to anybody else? Because he knows Trump means business.’
Democrats mocked the summit as ‘amateur hour’ — with Speaker Nancy Pelosi touting Kim the ‘big winner’ for getting the president to sit down and negotiate.
‘I guess it took two meetings for him to realize that Kim Jong Un is not on the level,’ Pelosi told reporters at the U.S. Capitol. ‘He was a big winner, Kim Jong Un, in getting to sit face-to-face with the most powerful person in the world – the president of the United States.’
Other Democratic lawmakers said they were not surprised that the Republican president — whose claim to fame is his deal-making skills — could not get Kim to agree the United States’ preconditions for sanctions relief.
They called the summit a ‘failure’ and the president who orchestrated it ‘naive’ for believing that the authoritarian leader would ever hand over his nuclear arsenal.
‘I’m not surprised it ended in failure. Trump just does not know what he’s doing,’ Congressman Brendan Boyle told DailyMail.com. ‘We have gotten absolutely nothing out of these two bilateral summits, other than a photo op.’
Congressman Ruben Gallego, a member on the House Armed Services Committee, said the administration is either ‘naive or so desperate for a deal’ that it was willing to offer North Korea ‘something for nothing’ to get to this point in talks.
‘North Korea does not intend to denuclearize,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘It shows either the administration is naive or so desperate for a deal that they would go down this path.’
Rep. Jim Clyburn, the number three House Democrat, told DailyMail.com as Trump flew back to the United States: ‘I don’t think anybody expected the president to get a deal out of that. I don’t know what he was thinking.’
Some legislators signaled relief that Trump had walked away, knowing what was on the table.
‘In some ways this might be the best possible realistic outcome from my perspective because I was nervous President Trump would make an agreement that would be far worse than just a failed summit,’ Boyle said.
One Democratic lawmaker, who asked to speak to the DailyMail.com on background, said,’ I guess no deal is better than a bad deal.’
The lawmaker added what really concerned him were the president’s comments on Otto Warmbier, the American student sent to a work camp who came back to the U.S. in a comma and died several days later.
‘I was blown away by the president’s quote about Otto Warmbier. That the president would defend Kim Jong-un and his regime I thought was incredible,’ the lawmaker said.
The member of Congress said the second summit did not help Trump’s reputation as a deal maker.
‘I think he really hasn’t done a deal with anybody,’ the lawmaker said, adding: ‘He tries to do things on his own. He’s not really a deal maker. At least he hasn’t shown that in politics.’
New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand also said she was ‘disappointed’ that Trump’s summit did not have a more productive conclusion.
‘I’m grateful, however, that he is focused on diplomacy and a political solution with North Korea, as opposed to a military one,’ she said. ‘I just would hope that he would, perhaps, engage with our allies and South Korea more, so that we can reach a more productive solution.’
Trouble was brewing for Trump on multiple fronts as he flew back to the U.S. on Thursday. His longtime fixer, Michael Cohen, claimed in congressional testimony that Trump ordered him to silence two women threatening to go public with affairs.
Cohen said that a $130,000 payoff to one of them, former adult film actress Stormy Daniels, was chump change to a billionaire like Trump.
The president mostly avoided the topic at his news conference by calling on a series of members of the foreign press corps he did not recognize rather than White House reporters preparing to quiz him on the crimes Cohen claims he witnessed.
He told Hannity, ‘As far as Cohen is concerned, he’s convicted, he’s a liar, he’s defrauded at a high level. He’s got a lot of problems. And you know, it was very interesting, because he lied so much.’
Trump said he watched some of the House Oversight hearing that Cohen testified at between the hours of 10 pm and 5 am, Hanoi time. He suggested with the statement that he was up late watching his disbarred former employee rather that prepping aggressively for his nuclear summit with Kim.
‘He lied so much, and yet he said when it came to collusion, the whole hoax with the Russia collusion, it’s just a witch hunt hoax, and by the way, very, very bad for our country,’ Trump told Hannity of Cohen, ‘because it really stops you from doing what you’re supposed to be doing. He said no collusion.’
The president was unusually quiet on his flight back from Vietnam as it all unfurled, having tweeted his way through his flight to Hanoi on Tuesday.
He’s scheduled to arrive at the White House in the wee hours of Friday morning, when Americans who most likely missed his Vietnam presser will once again be going to bed.
In Hanoi, Trump said that he remains on good terms with Kim and continued to tout the ‘enormous potential’ of North Korea but notably said there are no plans for another nuclear summit.
Trump candidly revealed that Kim wanted the sanctions off, but was not willing to give up his array of nukes, missiles, and additional sites he only alluded to vaguely.
‘They were willing to de-nuke a large portion of the areas that we wanted but we couldn’t give up all of the sanctions for that,’ Trump claimed. ‘We had to walk away from that particular suggestion. We had to walk away from that.’
He said, ‘It was about sanctions. They wanted sanctions lifted but they weren’t willing to do an area that we wanted.’
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added: ‘We have been working for weeks to find a path forward so we could make a big step at this summit. We made progress and even more progress when the two leaders met over the last 48, or 72 hours.
‘But we didn’t get all the way. We didn’t get something that made sense for the United States,’ he acknowledged.
The first signs of a rupture came when the White House suddenly made changes to the president’s schedule on Thursday afternoon local time.
A planned lunch meeting never happened, although a table was set with a floral centerpiece and menus folded inside napkins.
Reporters on hand to cover it were told to move to another location.
Sanders suddenly told reporters traveling with the president just before 1 pm local time that talks would wrap up within a half an hour, throwing the event’s schedule into turmoil.
She declined to say initially that there wouldn’t be a signing ceremony, though one had been on an earlier White House schedule. Only minutes before Trump was scheduled to face the press did she acknowledge that there would not be one.
The public White House schedule had listed a ‘Joint Agreement Signing Ceremony’ with the chairman of the state affairs commission of DPRK, set for 2:05 pm local time.
Trump was to have fielded questions at 4 pm, right before leaving Vietnam, but his news conference was subsequently moved to 2 pm, and he left immediately after that
Describing talks, which ran from a Wednesday dinner through mid-day Thursday, at the presser, Trump said Kim told him he was ‘not going to do testing of rockets and nuclear. I trust him and I take him at his word.’
He indicated that Kim was willing to make concessions related to the Yongbyon facility where his regime enriches Plutonium, but it wasn’t enough.
‘That facility while very big, it wasn’t enough to do what we were doing. We had to have more than that,’ said Trump.
Trump insisted that his relationship with Kim remains ‘warm’ and that he sees ‘great potential’ in North Korea, but added that sometimes ‘you have to be willing to walk away from a deal’ if it’s not the right one
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added that his team had been working with North Korea ‘for weeks’ to try and achieve a deal and that Trump and Kim made more progress towards a deal, but ‘we didn’t get all the way’
President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un resumed their summit in Hanoi on Thursday morning local time – as Trump predicted a ‘fantastic success’ but Kim said it was ‘too early’ to say they would reach a deal
Trump once again asserted that he was in ‘no rush’ to make an agreement – following an early report by NBC that the US was prepared to back away from a demand that North Korea provide a full accounting of its nuclear weapons programs
He made it clear in his remarks there were other sites the U.S. identified that Kim wanted to maintain.
‘We have that setup so we would be able to do that very easily. The inspections on North Korea will take place, and if we do something with them, we have a schedule setup that is very good. We know things … about certain places and certain sites. There are sites that people don’t know about that we know about. We would be able to do inspections we think very, very successfully,’ Trump said.
He insisted that the U.S. and North Korea remain in a position ‘to do something very special’ together’ and that he and Kim have ‘become very friendly’ with one another.
The U.S. dollar and South Korean stock market meanwhile fell on the news that no deal had been reached.
The recognition that the two parties were two far apart to agree to a joint statement came despite weeks of advance negotiations. A range of compromise gestures had been circulating for days in media reports.
Pompeo told reporters riding his plane back to Washington that the U.S. intentionally took a ‘big swing’ with the summit that it hoped would produce a deal.
‘We cleared away a lot of brush over the past, apparently, 60, 90 days at the working level, then we were hoping we could take another big swing when the two leaders got together. I think we did. We made some progress, but we didn’t get as far as we would have hoped to have gotten,’ he said.
The Cabinet official who has been running point on talks with North Korea since they began nearly a year ago insisted, ‘We were prepared for the potentiality of this outcome as well, and tomorrow we’ll get right back at it.’
He said of the signing ceremony that journalists ‘shouldn’t get hung up on things like that’ as he blasted reports about what the U.S. would be willing to concede for ultimately being wrong.
Pompeo singled out NBC for reporting that the U.S. was no longer insisting as a negotiating position that North Korea provide a ‘full accounting of its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs,’ which would amount to a major capitualtion.
‘I think that’d give you a lot more credibility to the world than going out and saying silly things that you know nothing about and speculating,’ he complained. ‘It was radically uninformed and now I think can be proven incorrect, and so you ought to go fix it.’
Pompeo said, ‘We were very hopeful we’d make enough progress that it would justify a signing statement at the ultimate concluding, and we didn’t. The President made that decision.
‘It’s a schedule. Yeah, we were scheduled to leave seven minutes earlier than we did too,’ he continued, as journalists tried to interject. ‘Look, it’s a long ways. We’ve known it was a long ways. There’s still a lot of work to do.’
After Trump and Kim’s historic summit in Singapore in June, they signed a joint statement – although critics lambasted it for failing to include a timetable or verification members in its undefined call for denuclearization.
Trump and Jong Un smile during a meeting at the second US-North Korea summit at the Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel in Hanoi
Trump listens as he meets North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Thursday in Hanoi
If the tension between Trump and Kim was there all along, it was not visible on Wednesday, when the two leaders and their aides smiled and chatted each other up at a poolside photo op.
The chummy atmosphere continued into Thursday, when Trump and Kim grinned for the cameras before the start of talks — Kim even took questions from U.S. media and expressed openness toward a step in normalization of relations.
The North Korean dictator said he is open to the idea of a liaison office in Pyongyang, in a major development in relations.
In another comment, he revealed his preference for denuclearization, although without saying what it would take to get him there.
‘If I was not, I wouldn’t be here,’ he said in his native Korean, while seated alongside Trump, according to a translator.
Trump once again asserted that he was in ‘no rush’ to make an agreement. ‘We don’t want the testing, and we’ve developed something very special with respect to that,’ Trump said, without revealing details, as the two men seemingly moved toward their expected joint statement.
A reporter asked Kim in Korean if he was confident of an agreement, and he responded, saying ‘It’s too early to say. I would not say I’m pessimistic.’
‘I have a feeling that good results will come,’ Kim added.
Trump once again called the relationship between the two men ‘very strong’ and said he believes that ‘a little bit longer term, and over a period of time, I know we’re going to have a fantastic success with respect to Chairman Kim and North Korea. They’re going to have an economic powerhouse.’
Trump predicted: ‘I think it’s going to be something very special.’
WHAT HAPPENED? On Wednesday Trump and Kim walked along with two interpreters beneath palm trees as Kim greeted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and general and spy chief Kim Yong Chol
Greeting: Trump and Kim shake hands at the top of their meeting in Hanoi – which was followed by a ‘quick dinner’
The Hanoi summit was Trump’s second with Kim since an inconclusive meeting in Singapore in June that produced much fanfare but little substance and there had been little sign of concrete progress since.
Facing mounting pressure at home over investigations into Russian meddling in the election, Trump had sought a big win by trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for promises of peace and development, a foreign policy goal that has confounded multiple predecessors.
‘It’s great to be with you. We had a very successful first summit,’ Trump said at his first meeting with Kim on Wednesday morning local time. ‘I felt it was very successful. Some people would like to see it go quicker. I’m satisfied, you’re satisfied. We want to be happy with what we’re doing.’
‘I thought the first summit was a great success, I think this one hopefully will be equal or greater than the first,’ the president added.
As he has repeatedly, Trump pointed to personal chemistry with the reclusive leader of the family-led one-party dictatorship.
‘We made a lot of progress and I think the biggest progress was our relationship is really a good one,’ he optimistically said.
Trump complemented a New York Times photographer in one of many asides to Kim
As he has repeatedly, Trump pointed to personal chemistry with the reclusive leader of the family-led one-party dictatorship – although his secretary of state says North Korea is still a nuclear threat, having tested a hydrogen bomb and months ago conducted a skein of missile tests
By the end of the summit, he said that the relationship was ‘very good, very friendly’ in spite of the way the talks ended.
‘This wasn’t a walk away, like you get up and walk out. No, this was very friendly. We shook hands. You know, there’s a warmth that we have, and I hope that stays. I think it will.’