North Korea praises Trump for call for ‘new method’ in talks

A North Korean official praised President Trump on Friday over the firing of national security adviser John Bolton, and celebrated Trump’s comments earlier in the week signaling a shift in policy toward North Korea.

The Associated Press reported that North Korea’s lead diplomat to the U.S., Kim Myong Gil, knocked Bolton as a “nasty trouble-maker” in a statement, and praised the Trump administration’s attempts to approach North Korea with “a more practical point of view.”

{mosads}″[I] would like to welcome the wise political decision of President Trump to approach the DPRK-U.S. relations from a more practical point of view now that a nasty trouble-maker who used to face everything out of his anachronistic way of thinking has disappeared from the U.S. administration,” he said.

The diplomat’s comments come after Trump criticized Bolton in a series of remarks on social media and at the White House following Bolton’s ouster from the administration, with Trump arguing that Bolton’s hawkish military stance contributed to “mistakes” made by the administration, particularly with North Korea.

“So, John is somebody that I actually got along with very well. He made some very big mistakes,” Trump said last week.

“As soon as he mentioned that, the Libyan model, what a disaster. Take a look at what happened to Gadhafi,” Trump added. “I don’t blame Kim Jong Un for what he said after that. And he wanted nothing to do with John Bolton. And that’s not a question of being tough. That’s a question of being not smart to say something like that.”

On Wednesday, Trump took those remarks a step further, commenting that “maybe a new method would be very good” when it came to North Korea, according to the AP.

Trump recently announced that he has received an invitation to visit Pyongyang alongside North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, but U.S. officials have not yet announced a third formal summit between the two leaders.