The White House on Tuesday said that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet this week with a top North Korean official in New York as the U.S. “continues to actively prepare” for President Trump’s expected summit with Kim Jong Un.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump will also meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Washington on June 7, five days before the proposed summit date.
The flurry of activity is the latest indication Trump is scrambling to save the North Korean summit, which he scrapped in a letter to Kim just last week.
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Sanders said “the North Koreans have been engaging” since Trump wrote the letter last Thursday informing Kim that their meeting was off.
The North Korean official who will meet with Pompeo is Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the ruling party’s central committee. He will be the highest-ranking official from Pyongyang to travel to the U.S. since 2000, when Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok met with then-President Clinton amid a failed effort to broker a nuclear agreement.
Much about the meeting remains up in the air, including whether it will take place on June 12 in Singapore as originally planned.
Sanders said a high-ranking delegation of U.S. officials is meeting with North Koreans at the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas and that “they plan to have additional meetings this week.”
Deputy White House chief of staff Joe Hagin is also traveling to Singapore with a team to plan for logistics.
National security adviser John Bolton has been on the phone with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts “virtually every day,” Sanders said.