Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will head to North Korea later this week for his third meeting with Kim Jong Un, as the Trump administration continues to push for complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
“There’s great momentum right now for positive change,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Monday after announcing Pompeo’s upcoming trip.
Pompeo is set to depart for Pyongyang on July 5, following meetings last weekend between senior North Korean officials and U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, who has played a key role in negotiations between the two countries.
“We’ve had good conversations as recently as yesterday,” Sanders said of Kim’s meetings on Sunday.
The administration has continued to tout its diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea, following the historic summit between Trump and Kim in mid-June. But some intelligence officials grew worried last week over a series of satellite images that appeared to show the expansion of a ballistic missile test site in the North Korean city of Hamhung.
Sanders declined to comment on such claims, and said she could not “confirm or deny any of the intelligence reporting that’s out there.” But she did say there were some key signs of progress that all can see.
“In the last eight months, you haven’t seen missile launches. You haven’t seen the nuclear detonations and again, these conversations are continuing to evolve,” she added. “I’m not going to get into the details, but the process is moving along.”
