Following his summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, President Trump claimed on Tuesday that North Korea “took billions of dollars” during the Clinton administration for “nothing.” Neither claim is true.
what was said
— Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters in Singapore on Tuesday.
the facts
The highly-anticipated meeting in Singapore ended with a joint statement in which Mr. Kim committed to “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” Later, at a news conference, Mr. Trump recounted how Mr. Kim had contrasted the ongoing negotiations with a 1994 nuclear deal that was struck with North Korea during the administration of President Bill Clinton.
Under the 1994 deal, North Korea was to be provided with $4 billion in energy aid for heavy oil shipments and two light-water nuclear reactors. In exchange, North Korea agreed to freeze and dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
By the time the deal broke down years later, during the presidency of George W. Bush, the aid the United States had provided amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars — not “billions of dollars.”
From 1994 to 2003, the United States contributed over $400 million in financial support to the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or K. E. D. O., the international consortium tasked with overseeing the project. Most of that money went toward fuel shipments.
The amount provided during the Clinton administration was about $250 million, said Jeffrey Lewis, an analyst at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
In November 2002, the Bush administration announced it would stop financing fuel shipments after American intelligence concluded that North Korea had been conducting a weapons program using highly enriched uranium.
