Last week's summit between President Donald Trump and North Korea Chairman Kim Jong Un was "doomed from the outset" but "to his credit," the president walked away from what would not have been a good deal for the United States, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Tuesday.
He also told CNN's "New Day" that he doesn't buy Trump's claim that his former attorney Michael Cohen's congressional hearings led in part to his walking away from the Hanoi summit.
"No, I don't think it had anything to do with it, and it took him two or three days to think that one up," Clapper, now a national security analyst for CNN, commented.
A special envoy would have had some "deliverables" worked out so that the summit would have been "more of a formality," Clapper continued.
Further, the North Koreans believe that denuclearization applies both ways, said Clapper, and the lack of advance preparation and Trump's "hubris" meant the summit was doomed.
Clapper said he was concerned that Trump would "concede something, like agreeing over time to take all U.S. forces off the peninsula," to provide a distraction to the Cohen hearing.
He also said he thinks it's a real problem that Trump agreed to give up on major joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea, because "we didn't get anything for that."
“This is something that the president gratuitously gave away at Singapore in June, and he didn’t need to,” Clapper said, adding the exercises were important for readiness purposes.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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