Senate gets North Korea lowdown at White House
range missiles tipped with miniaturized nuclear warheads capable of striking the United States.
The White House has bracketed the week with North Korea-related events, starting on Monday with a gathering of the U.N. Security Council in the White House, at which Kimand his nuclear ambitions were the prime topic.
Then came Wednesday’s unusual briefing of senators enmasseattheWhiteHouse. And on Friday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson travels to New York to chair a ministerial-level meeting of the Security Council on North Korea.
“It’s not all about optics,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Wednesday. “There’s a clear message being sent that this is front and center on our national security radar.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., requested Wednesday’s meeting, and the White House offered to host it.
Some Democrats dismissed the exercise as a “photo op” timed to coincide withtheWhiteHouse’schoreography around Trump’s 100th day in office. And after they returned to the Capitol, even leading Republican senators were circumspect about what was achieved.
“It was an OK briefing,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn. “I’m not certain I would have had” the gathering.
Most of the 100 senators attended, the lawmakers said, and the president spoke briefly to welcome them before turning it over to the team of briefers: Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Joseph Dunford.
Sen. Christopher Coons, D-Del., called the briefing “sobering,” adding that it was “an important opportunity for the entire Senate to hear the emerging plans of the Trump administration to confront what is a very real threat to our security.”
At the State Department, Tonersaid acts of pressure on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un could include forcing Pyongyang to shut down its handful of embassies around the world, expelling its diplomats and barring its personnel from international organizations.
The Trump administration is also demandingthatall Sens. John Boozman, R-Ark., Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Jerry Moran, R-Kan., leave the Capitol for a briefing Wednesday on North Korea at the White House. nations — especially China — obey stringent sanctions already in place against the Kim government, he said.
Tensions with North Korea have soared over the past two weeks. With Kimpresiding, North Korea on Tuesday staged thunderous live-fire artillery drills.
The USS Michigan, a guided-missile submarine, arrived Tuesday at Busan, South Korea. And on Wednesday, South Korea began installing elements of an American missile-defense system that has piqued concern by Beijing and Moscow.
In the briefing with senators, Trump administration officials described plans to ratchet up economic pressure on North Korea in an effort to choke off the country’s access to components for building military equipment, the official said.
Earlier in the day, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific took personal responsibility for a series of White House and Pentagon misstatements that led to global confusion about the location of an aircraft carrier strike group.
“That’s my fault,” Adm. Harry Harris told the House Armed Services Committee. “I’ll take the hit for that.”
The episode began on April 8 when the Navy announced that the Carl Vinson strike force was being diverted north from Singapore as a show of force during rising tensions with North Korea. The carrier group instead conducted exercises in the Indian Ocean for a week, and was headed in the wrong direction last weekend. On Wednesday, it was east of Okinawa, Harris said.