South Korean Presidential Blue House via Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — A former adviser to President Donald Trump said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un hasn’t yet met the U.S. leader he “better prepare for” that.
Tom Bossert, an ABC News contributor and former White House adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism, told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” Sunday, that he has some advice for Kim ahead of the planned summit between him and President Trump.
“Just a thought here, we’ve all given advice to President Trump. I think a little advice to Kim Jong Un” is in order, Bossert said. “First, he’s not met President Trump yet and he better prepare for that.”
Kim has met with a member of Trump’s inner circle — Mike Pompeo, who was at the time CIA director and is now secretary of state. But the planned June 12 summit would be the first time Kim and Trump meet.
A second piece of advice to Kim, said Bossert, was about North Korea’s recent, highly publicized destruction of a site where it had tested nuclear weapons.
“These demonstrations of blowing up tunnels, whether they’re complete or whether they’re facades, just for show, it’s really not helping matters,” Bossert said. “Even if they believe that to be a helpful gesture, it does make later confirmation of our [nuclear] inspectors, and what was in those tunnels all that more difficult. And so to build trust, I think that they should stop taking those unilateral actions at this point.”
Bossert appeared on “This Week” as part of a panel discussing the planned summit.
Another member of the panel, Sue Mi Terry, a senior fellow for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former CIA analyst on Korea issues, said it isn’t “realistic” to expect North Korea to accomplish complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.
“We still have to set it up as a goal,” Terry said to Stephanopoulos. But, she added, “We don’t know where all the weapons are, how many they have, where they’re all hidden.”
“There are thousands of underground tunnels where they are hidden, so [any] verification process is going to be very, very difficult to achieve. So we need to have a realistic expectation.”
Trump announced Friday that his planned meeting with Kim Jong Un on June 12 in Singapore is back on after the president had cancelled it a little more than a week before.
Trump also hinted at the possibility for more U.S.-North Korea meetings in the future, saying, “I think it’ll be a process. I never said it was going to be just one meeting.”
Copyright © 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.