The White House played host Wednesday to an all-Senators briefing focused on the North Korea threat. One lawmaker called the session “sobering.”
The White House played host Wednesday to an all-senators briefing focused on the North Korea threat — a meeting which, though serious in tone, yielded few new specifics.
White House officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, briefed the senators.
President Donald Trump also made a brief stop at the meeting, a White House official told NBC News, staying for “just a few minutes” at the top of the gathering.
It was a session that Sen. Chris Coons, D-Delaware, called “sobering.”
But while senators who spoke with NBC News stressed the seriousness of the threat of an increasingly aggressive North Korea poses, few specifics of the administration’s next steps were made publicly available after the meeting.
A joint readout from Tillerson, Mattis, and Coats described the president’s future approach as aiming to “pressure North Korea into dismantling its nuclear, ballistic missile, and proliferation programs by tightening economic sanctions and pursuing diplomatic measures with our Allies and regional partners.”
While the U.
