My button is bigger, Trump tells N. Korea
Arsenal of devastating arms ‘more powerful,’ he boasts
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump again raised the prospect of nuclear war with North Korea on Tuesday night, boasting that he commands a “much bigger” and “more powerful” arsenal of devastating weapons than the outlier government in Asia.
In a separate tweet, Trump accused a former Clinton aide of “disregarding basic security protocols” and called his own Justice Department a “deep state.”
“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times,’” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
In his New Year’s address, Kim repeated his own fiery nuclear threats against the United States. He said he has a “nuclear button” on his office desk and warned that “the whole territory of the U.S. is within the range of our nuclear strike.”
Trump’s response raised the temperature in the brewing confrontation between the United States and North Korea even as American allies in South Korea were moving to open talks with Pyongyang. The contrast between Trump’s language and the peace overture by South Korea highlighted the growing rift between the two longtime allies.
The president’s saber-rattling tweet shifted the tenor of his response to the South Korean initiative just hours after a milder initial statement. Trump, who has scorned the prospects of negotiating with North Korea, earlier in the day said the possible talks between the two governments on the peninsula resulted from sanctions imposed by the United States and the inter-
national community.
“Perhaps that is good news, perhaps not — we will see!” he wrote Tuesday morning.
Why Trump hardened his message later the same day was not immediately clear. But Trump has not hesitated to match North Korea’s incendiary language even while other American presidents resisted such back-and-forth taunting out of concern that it was unwise and unnecessarily rewarding the hermit nation.
Last summer, Trump vowed to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea if it posed a threat to the United States. Last fall, he went before the United Nations General Assembly to warn that he would “totally destroy North Korea” if the United States were forced to defend itself or its allies.
Although Trump alluded in his Tuesday tweet to having a physical nuclear button, he doesn’t actually have one.
The process for launching a nuclear strike is secret and complex, and involves the use of a nuclear “football,” which is carried by a rotating group of military officers everywhere the president goes and is equipped with communication tools and a book with prepared war plans.
If the president were to order a strike, he would identify himself to military officials at the Pentagon with codes unique to him. Those codes are recorded on a card known as the “biscuit” that is carried by the president at all times. He would then transmit the launch order to the Pentagon and Strategic Command.
TRUMP TWEETS ON CLINTON
Earlier Tuesday, Trump made his first “Crooked Hillary” Twitter post of the new year, calling out longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin and former FBI Director James Comey in the process.
“Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols,” he wrote. “She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others.”
Attacking his former Democratic opponent from the 2016 presidential election and taking aim at his own Justice Department struck familiar tones for the new year. Almost 14 months after the 2016 presidential election, Trump has kept up a regular drumbeat of attacks on Clinton. Last year, Trump also criticized the Justice Department and Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not pursing investigations of his political opponents.
Tuesday morning’s Twitter post followed an article in
The Daily Caller, a conservative publication that Trump closely monitors. The article said Abedin forwarded some government passwords to her private Yahoo email account in 2009, when Clinton was secretary of state. Yahoo was hacked in 2013, which affected all 3 billion of its accounts. After the breach, the data was offered for sale by a hacking collective based in Eastern Europe.
Asked if Trump was urging the Justice Department to investigate Abedin, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders replied: “The facts of that case are very disturbing. The president wants to make clear that he doesn’t feel that anyone should be above the law. In terms of any investigation, that would be something the Department of Justice would need to decide.”
A Clinton spokesman did not reply to a request for comment. Dan Schwerin, a former Clinton campaign speechwriter, defended Abedin on Twitter.
The term “deep state” typically refers to a shadow government of agency officials who secretly plot to influence policy; they are usually associated with countries that have authoritarian elements that undercut democratically elected leaders.
Sanders said Trump “obviously” does not consider all members of the Justice Department to be among a “deep state” conspiracy to sabotage his presidency. She emphasized that Trump appointed Christopher Wray to run the FBI because the president “wants to change the culture of that agency and he thinks he’s the right person to do that.”
In a tweet, Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general whom Trump fired in January after she refused to defend his travel ban on immigrants from some Muslim-majority countries, accused the president of slandering Justice Department employees and called his pronouncements “dangerous.”
The State Department released about 3,000 of Abedin’s work-related emails on Friday. The emails were found on the laptop of Abedin’s now estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, and were released as part of a public records request.
Those emails are a sore spot for Clinton. Comey had notified Congress shortly before the 2016 election about the existence of newly discovered emails that could be relevant to the closed investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.
In a book released last year, Clinton said Comey’s October 2016 disclosure hurt her campaign’s momentum and helped Trump win the election.
Trump’s comment on the “sailors pictures” seems to be a reference to 30-year-old Kristian Saucier, who was sentenced to a year in prison for taking photos in a classified area of a nuclear submarine.
Trump has previously compared that case to the Clinton email probe, suggesting that Clinton was given leniency that others weren’t. Saucier, though, tried to destroy evidence — which is a critical indication of bad intent that investigators found lacking in the Clinton case.
In a separate tweet Tuesday, Trump took credit for the safety of the U.S. aviation system, even though it is being run by a holdover from the previous administration and has avoided any commercial passenger fatalities for several years before he took office.
“Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation,” Trump wrote Tuesday morning. “Good news — it was just reported that there were zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record.”
If by “commercial aviation” he means scheduled passenger airline flights, the record actually stretches back to July 2013, when an Asiana Airlines plane struck a seawall as it was about to land in San Francisco, killing three people. The last death on a U.S.-registered airline was in 2009 near Buffalo, N.Y.
Commercial aviation generally refers to paying customers on planes of all sorts. The National Transportation Safety Board reported at least 13 deaths last year in seven crashes involving commercial charter flights in the U.S.
Information for this article was contributed by Eileen Sullivan of
The New York Times; by David Nakamura and Matt Zapotosky of
The Washington Post; by Catherine Lucey, Darlene Superville, Jill Colvin and other staff members of The Associated Press; and by Ryan Beene and Alan Levin of Bloomberg News.