President Trump suggested Sunday that Democrats were partly to blame for his failure to secure a denuclearization agreement with North Korea last week.
In a tweet, Trump pointed to public hearing the House Oversight Committee held with his former lawyer Michael Cohen at the same time the president was meeting with Kim Jong Un in Vietnam.
“For the Democrats to interview in open hearings a convicted liar & fraudster, at the same time as the very important Nuclear Summit with North Korea, is perhaps a new low in American politics and may have contributed to the ‘walk.’ Never done when a president is overseas. Shame!” Trump said.
For the Democrats to interview in open hearings a convicted liar & fraudster, at the same time as the very important Nuclear Summit with North Korea, is perhaps a new low in American politics and may have contributed to the “walk.” Never done when a president is overseas. Shame!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2019
Trump abruptly walked away from his second summit with Kim in Hanoi after they failed to agree on terms that would see Pyongyang take concrete steps towards dismantling its nuclear weapons and missile programs in exchange for sanctions relief.
Back on Capitol Hill, Cohen faced a grilling from Democrats and Republicans on Wednesday about his relationship with the president and his actions, including lying to Congress in previous testimony. Casting Trump as a liar, schemer, and racist, Cohen testified under oath that his former boss asked him around 500 times to threaten people as his former fixer for a period of roughly 12 years.
Trump told reporters in Hanoi that Cohen’s testimony was “incorrect” and condemned the Democratic majority of the panel for scheduling the hearing at the same time as his summit with Kim.
“It’s very interesting, because I tried to watch as much as I could,” Trump said. “I wasn’t able to watch too much because I’ve been a little bit busy. But I think having a fake hearing like that, and having it in the middle of this very important summit is really a terrible thing. They could’ve made it two days later or next week, and it would’ve been even better. They would’ve had more time.
Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, defended the president’s actions during an interview Sunday morning on CNN. “If you can’t get a good deal, and the president offered North Korea the best deal it could possibly get — no deal is better than a bad deal,” Bolton said. “So the president’s decided to shake things up in North Korean diplomacy given the failure of the last three administrations to achieve the denuclearization of North Korea. He, obviously, thinks it’s worth trying. We’ll see now what comes next.”
Trump was even praised by Democratic leadership, after some critics were concerned the president might concede too much the Kim in the hopes of maintaining diplomatic momentum. “President Trump did the right thing by walking away and not cutting a poor deal for the sake of a photo op,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday.
In an olive branch to Pyongyang, U.S. officials announced this weekend that the United States would halt planned military exercises with South Korea in the spring after the president complained of their cost. North Korea has long viewed the exercises between the two allies as a demonstration of a threat against the Kim regime. Getting the U.S. to stop the exercises has been one of the major planks in negotiations between the two countries.
Still, it’s not clear how much progress Trump is actually making in meeting Kim. Although the rogue regime hasn’t conducted nuclear or missile tests since late 2017, the New York Times reported Sunday that North Korean hackers targeted U.S. and its European allies even as the Hanoi summit took place.
