Ex-South Korean Minister: Bolton’s Last-Minute Demands Derailed Kim-Trump Summit Deal

Trump claims North Korea insisted that all sanctions be gone in return for getting rid of only some nuclear capabilities, Koreans say this is a lie.

North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho says they offered to dismantle all their nuclear material production in return for only partial sanctions relief, yet Trump walked away.

The former South Korean Unification Minister Chong Se-Hyun said the summit was derailed by John Bolton who prevailed on Trump to raise the bar and suddenly start demanding North Korea provide a full account of its chemical and biological weapons as well.

The North Koreans actually accepted this in principle but wanted more sanctions relief in return, at which point US ended the summit.

https://twitter.com/DrKevinGray/status/1101089899430793221

You should understand John Bolton was part of the Cheney gang which created the North Korea crisis in the Bush years in the first place and has been trying to sabotage normalization with North Korea ever since he became a part of Trump administration.

Ahead of the Kim-Trump summit Bolton was supposed to travel to South Korea and coordinate with Seoul but he canceled the trip in the last minute “to focus on Venezuela”.

Trump’s envoy to North Korea who did the work to set up the meeting meanwhile was sidelined:

“Something happened,” Christine Ahn, founder and international coordinator of the Women Cross DMZ activist group, said Thursdayduring a press call, discussing signs in Kim’s personnel choice  that he was prepared for serious diplomacy. “When we saw the table and John Bolton sitting at the table and Stephen Biegun sitting behind when he had done all this work to do all this preparation, it just seemed for us, ‘Oh my gosh, something fishy is going on here.'”