Pelosi says she's "glad" Trump walked away from North Korea summit with no deal
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she's "glad" President Trump walked away from summit talks with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un without a concrete deal. Mr. Trump is returning to Washington from Hanoi Thursday, after denuclearization talks collapsed over disagreements on sanctions and nuclear facility inspections.
"I guess it took two meetings for him to realize Kim Jong Un is not on the level. He was a big winner, Kim Jong Un in getting to sit face-to-face with the most powerful person in the world," said Pelosi.
"Really, it's good the president did not give him anything for the little that he was proposing," and she added, "I'm glad that the president walked away from that," that is, the total removal of sanctions from North Korea in exchange for only partial
Pelosi said that she was "glad that the president walked away" from the idea of totally lifting sanctions against North Korea in exchange for limited nuclear reductions from the regime.
North Korea, the president said, wanted the U.S. to eliminate all sanctions while only offering to shutter a single nuclear facility.
"Diplomacy is important, we always support it, but the prospect of success seemed dim in light of the insincerity of Kim Jong Un." Asked about the president saying he believes Kim's denial that he didn't know about imprisoned American Otto Warmbier's treatment in North Korean captivity, Pelosi replied: "There is something wrong with Putin, Kim Jong Un—in my view, thugs—that the President chooses to believe."
Meanwhile, Pelosi said that while she didn't watch much of Wednesday's blockbuster hearing, in which Mr. Trump's former personal attorney and "fixer" Michael Cohen called the president a "cheat" and a "con man," she commended Democratic members for doing a "good job of trying to elicit the truth to try to get to the facts."
Cohen appeared before the House Oversight Committee in a public hearing for over five hours, where he testified that the president made it understood that he should lie about the Trump Tower Moscow project and about hush money payments to a woman who claimed to have had an affair with Mr. Trump. Cohen also accused the president of inflating the value of his properties, lying about business ventures in Russia and knowing about the release of a trove of hacked Democratic emails ahead of their release by WikiLeaks in 2016.
"I'm not in any position to verify what he said," Pelosi said of Cohen's testimony, but said that she trusts committee chairman Rep. Elijah Cummings' judgment about Cohen's "suspicions" about cases of possible collusion or criminality on the Trump campaign.