Trump cancels sanctions on Nkorea that US had just issued
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump undercut his own Treasury Department on Friday by announcing he was rolling back North Korea sanctions that it imposed just a day ago.
The move, announced on Twitter, represented a striking case of a White House intervening to reverse a major national security decision made only hours earlier by the president’s own officials.
“It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea,” Trump said on Twitter. “I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!”
Trump appeared to confuse the day that the sanctions were announced, saying the move occurred Friday rather than Thursday.
The Treasury Department on Thursday imposed new sanctions on two Chinese shipping companies it says have been helping North Korea evade international sanctions. The sanctions linked to North Korea were the first Treasury had imposed since late last year and came less than a month after a summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, collapsed in Hanoi, Vietnam.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the decision was a favor to Kim.
“President Trump likes Chairman Kim, and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary,” she said.
Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, personally signed off on the sanctions and had hailed them in a statement Thursday.
Meanwhile, the administration slapped new sanctions on Iran on Friday, accusing it of keeping top nuclear scientists together as a team so they can forge ahead building nuclear weapons in the future.
The sanctions targeted 14 individuals and 17 companies connected to Iran’s Organization of Defensive Innovation of Research. The Treasury Department said many had worked in the early 2000s on the Amad plan, an early nuclear-weapons program, and continue to carry out research and development on dualuse technology that can be employed for energy and medical purposes, as well as potentially to build nuclear weapons.
“The intellectual firepower behind the Amad program very much continues to exist in Iran,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We are making them radioactive internationally.”