Secretary of State Mike Pompeo swatted away reports that he is in a budding rivalry with White House national security adviser John Bolton for influence over the administration’s policy regarding North Korea.
“Those articles are unfounded and a complete joke,” Pompeo told reporters Thursday afternoon.
Bolton has been a lightning rod with respect to North Korea policy for years, dating back to his tenure in President George W. Bush’s administration. His recent remarks about following “the Libya model” for defusing the crisis provoked insults and bellicose statements from the regime, as well as an implicit rebuke from President Trump. Bolton did not attend Trump’s meeting with the senior North Korean official who visited the White House last week, reportedly being excluded at Pompeo’s suggestion.
“Pompeo views Bolton skeptically, two people familiar with their relationship say, and doesn’t trust his motives on North Korea,” according to a CNN report. “The two men barely knew each other before Bolton’s arrival as national security advisor, but Pompeo has grown to dislike his approach and believes he is ‘trying to advance his own agenda,’ one official said.”
The story described Pompeo as having “angrily confronted Bolton in a heated conversation at the White House” about his allusion to Libya. But Pompeo defended Bolton’s comments in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, when Democrats maintained that the senior White House aide should have known that he would anger the North Koreans given that the late Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown and killed years after dismantling his weapons of mass destruction program.
“Ambassador Bolton and I will disagree with great consistency over time, I’m confident,” Pompeo said Thursday. “We’re two individuals, we’re each going to present our views. I’m confident that will happen on issues from how long this press conference ought to go to issues that really matter to the world. So it’s absolutely the case that Ambassador Bolton and I won’t always agree. I think the president demands that we each give him our own views.”
