The secretary of state did not manage to reassure Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Russia or North Korea.
Following two meetings — one with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in June and Russian President Vladimir Putin last week — lawmakers want to know just what President Donald Trump agreed to in closed, private meetings with two men who represent major U. S. adversaries.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appeared on Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to defend those meetings, but bristled when pushed for actual information, and admitted that he had neither spoken to the interpreter present in the Trump-Putin meeting nor seen the notes from that meeting.
“Senator, I understand the game that you’re playing,” Pompeo pushed back when Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) needled him for details.
Menendez also wanted to know what happened at the meeting with Kim, having seen “not a classified briefing, not anything” on what Trump promised. “It seems Kim Jong-un got everything he wanted,” said Menendez, calling the vague agreement the “art of concessions rather than the art of the deal.”
In his opening statement, Pompeo gave what assurances he could without offering much that was new — reaffirming the U. S.’s commitments to sanctions, to the denuclearization of North Korea, and to refusing to recognize Crimea (which Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014) as part of the Russian Federation.
He did assure the committee that Trump accepts U. S. intelligence that Russia interferes with the 2016 U. S. elections — something that did not seem to be the case when Trump met with Putin on July 16, when he told the press that he took Putin’s word over that of the FBI.
But none of this addressed the issue at the heart of the hearing: What was the president agreeing to behind closed doors, with none of his advisers present and little — if anything — in writing?
Looking at the Trump administration’s foreign policy, Sen.
