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The two leaders are due to meet in Singapore on 12 June
North Korea is making its demands clear. This has very little to do with military drills and more to do with the Sunday talk shows in the US during which John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, outlined what might be on offer if Kim Jong-un gave up his nuclear weapons.
The North Koreans have been watching and they do not like what they have heard.
The whole reason the state has spent years building up a nuclear arsenal, at such a great cost, is for survival.
So to compare denuclearisation in North Korea with Libya – as John Bolton did on Sunday – is not going to offer much comfort. The regime collapsed and its leader did not survive.
The root of the problem is one of language and interpretation.
Rival agendas
For months, the world has heard that North Korea is willing to denuclearise and many analysts in Korea raised their eyebrows.
They warned that there was a gap between what the US and North Korea would mean by that.
America wants North Korea to give up its weapons over a set period of time and only then will it be given economic rewards.
They also want the process to be quick, perhaps over a couple of years.
North Korea’s definition of denuclearisation is very different. It has always talked in terms of the entire peninsula.
That means the US has to act too – perhaps cutting the number of troops based in South Korea or also getting rid of the nuclear umbrella it uses to protect the region. If the state is going to give up its weapons it will also want security guarantees
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Go Myong-Hyun from the Asan Institute thinks Donald Trump has “finally met his match” when it comes to geopolitical negotiations.
“The US appears to have been coming up with additional and more stringent demands that North Korea didn’t like. What they’re saying is if you keep giving demands that we don’t like, we are willing to walk way.”
There are, however, signs some sort of a deal can still be done.
John Delury, professor of history at Yonsei University, is optimistic. He described this as a “hiccup” but believes the situation could be diffused with the right message.
Media captionWhy North Korea is angry at this man
“North Korea didn’t say it wasn’t going to give up its nukes. It said we are not going to denuclearise if you’re going to hold a gun to our head. They’re not going to give up this deterrent for nothing. They’re saying this process is going to have to be reciprocal and you’re going to have to do stuff just like we do stuff.”
This announcement is a warning shot to the Trump administration.
Playing Trump?
North Korea is obviously aware how much President Trump wants this summit, as Go Myong-Hyun points out.
“He’s been spending a couple of weeks taking credit for the positive outcome. North Korea has realised President Trump’s political capital is invested in this. Another way of putting it is he is trapped in this process. If President Trump doesn’t stop making demands and not offering anything in return then he’s going to lose his summit.”
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The “taking credit’ part has also irritated Pyongyang. There were signs of it during the US secretary of state’s latest visit to the North Korean capital.
At one point, a senior official turned to Mike Pompeo after a warm toast and reminded him that this process had not come about due to the Trump administration’s maximum pressure strategy or sanctions.
Image copyright EPA
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The release of three Americans from prison was a major concession by North Korea
North Korea wants the world to know that it is coming to the negotiating table from a position of strength. It may also feel that it is making all the concessions.
It has suspended all missile tests and released the three US detainees. Kim Jong-un met President Moon and the pair signed a declaration, and they are about to dismantle a nuclear test site in front of international media.
So to hear the Trump administration claiming credit for a deal it does not like has been a step too far.
Many will say this move is straight out the Pyongyang playbook. That North Korea has a history of walking away from talks and deals. It does. It also has a lot more experience at this kind of diplomacy than the current US administration.
The development will hand sceptics more ammunition to say that this time is not different, as so many had hoped. And that after all the smiles and handshakes and walks in the garden with President Moon, Kim Jong-un remains untrustworthy.
That makes the next few steps even more difficult. South Korea and the US must decide how to respond.
Do they cave in and offer a concession? Perhaps scale down the military exercises? Or do they tough this one out and hope Kim Jong-un wants this historic summit with the US president just as much as the other way around?
In new financial disclosure documents, President Trump reported reimbursing his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for an expenditure over $100,000 last year — an apparent reference to the $130,000 that Cohen paid to ensure the silence of an adult-film actress who claimed she’d had an affair with Trump.
“In 2016 expenses were incurred by one of Donald J. Trump’s attorneys, Michael Cohen,” Trump reported in a footnote of his official Personal Financial Disclosure report, required of top federal officials. “Mr. Cohen sought reimbursement of those expenses and Mr. Trump fully reimbursed Mr. Cohen in 2017. The category of value would be $100,001 — $250,000 and the interest rate would be zero.”
Earlier this year, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he had not known about Cohen’s payment to Daniels.
“Do you know where he got the money to make that payment?” a reporter asked at the time.
“No,” Trump said. “I don’t know.”
More recently, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani — newly hired as part of Trump’s legal team — said in interviews that Trump had reimbursed Cohen for the payment. Trump this month also acknowledged on Twitter that he paid Cohen through a monthly retainer to stop what Trump called “false and extortionist accusations.”
The payment by Cohen to actress Stormy Daniels was made in the last weeks before the 2016 presidential election, as part of a non-disclosure agreement meant to ensure Daniels would not speak about the alleged affair publicly.
After the payment to Daniels was first revealed by the Wall Street Journal, Cohen acknowledged making the payment himself. He said he had not been reimbursed by Trump’s company or Trump’s campaign.
“Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” Cohen said, using Daniels’s real name, Stephanie Clifford. The payment to Daniels was made via a limited-liability company, Essential Consultants, which Cohen had set up in 2016.
Cohen declined at the time to answer The Washington Post’s questions about whether Trump had personally reimbursed him, or if knew about the payment.
The Office of Government Ethics, which oversees the financial-disclosure documents, said in its own footnote that it had concluded Trump had to report the payment to Cohen in a section that detailed Trump’s legal liabilities over the course of 2017 and the first half of 2018.
“OGE has concluded that the information related to the payment made by Mr. Cohen is required to be reported and that the information provided meets the disclosure requirement for a reportable liability,” the agency said.
In addition, the Office of Government Ethics released a letter dated on Tuesday to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein saying that it had concluded that Trump was required to disclose this liability owed to Cohen.
Federal prosecutors in New York are already investigating Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen for a series of possible crimes, including bank fraud and campaign finance violations, according to people familiar with the matter.
As part of that investigation, FBI agents are trying to determine whether any laws were violated as part of a pattern or strategy of silencing damaging accounts about Trump that could have been made public during the election campaign, these people said.
That letter was written in response to a complaint from a watchdog organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which said that Trump should have reported the payments to Cohen in last year’s disclosures.
Noah Bookbinder, the watchdog group’s executive director, said Tuesday that Trump’s filing “suggests we were right in our previous complaint and raises serious questions as to why [the reimbursement to Cohen] was not disclosed in last year’s filing.”
Michael Avenatti, an attorney representing Daniels, on Tuesday questioned why Trump was acknowledging the payment — and his reimbursement of Cohen — now. “Was he lying then or was he lying now? He previously denied any knowledge of the agreement or the payment — and did so aboard Air Force One on video.”
Before taking office, Trump said he shifted day-to-day control of his business to his sons, primarily Eric Trump. But the president retains ownership of those businesses, through a trust, and can take money out of them at any time.
Emma Brown, Beth Reinhard, Devlin Barrett and Tom Hamburger contributed to this report.
