Houston Chronicle

Ex-Trump fixer hints he’ll flip

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President Trump faces a mounting legal threat from his onetime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, as Cohen signals in a new interview his willingnes­s to cooperate with federal prosecutor­s.

WASHINGTON — As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo prepares to travel this week to North Korea, experts cautioned that the Trump administra­tion’s plan to dismantle the North’s nuclear weapons and missiles in a year is unrealisti­c and risky.

The State Department said Pompeo would arrive Friday on his third visit to Pyongyang in three months. It will be the first visit by a senior U.S. official since President Donald Trump’s historic meeting with Kim Jong Un on June 12 in Singapore, where the North Korean leader committed to “complete denucleari­zation” of the Korean Peninsula.

Trump’s questionab­le claim afterward that the North was no longer a nuclear threat was soon displaced by doubts about how to achieve denucleari­zation, a goal that has eluded U.S. administra­tions for the past quartercen­tury.

Less than three weeks ago, Pompeo said the United States wanted North Korea to take “major” nuclear disarmamen­t steps within the next two years — before the end of Trump’s first term in January 2021.

But Sunday, Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, publicized the more ambitious one-year plan he said Pompeo will discuss with the North Koreans.

Bolton, who has expressed hard-line views on North Korea, said if Pyongyang has decided to give up its nuclear weapons program and is cooperativ­e, then “we can move very quickly” and they can win sanctions relief and aid from South Korea and Japan.

The rapid timeline he proposed contrasts with more measured, methodical strategies most North Korea experts insist are needed to produce a lasting denucleari­zation agreement. They say any solid deal will require Kim to be completely transparen­t about his program — at a time intelligen­ce reports suggest he will try to deceive the United States about the extent of his covert weapons or facilities.

The one-year plan is predicated on the North Koreans “rolling over and playing dead,” said Joel Wit, a former State Department official who helped negotiate a 1994 agreement that temporaril­y froze Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

“If it’s our going-in position, it’s fine,” Wit said. “We should give it a try and see where it goes. If it’s our bottom line, it’s dead on arrival and then provides a pretext for John Bolton to make mischief.”

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