South Korea denounces former US national security adviser USA John Bolton for what he calls his distorted recollection of events in his revealing new memory.
In a statement released Monday, South Korea’s national security adviser Chung Eui-yong questioned Bolton’s version of how talks broke up between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
“It does not reflect accurate facts and substantially distort facts,” Chung said of Bolton’s characterization of high-level discussions.
While declining to elaborate on Bolton’s specific claims that South Korea disagreed with, Chung cautioned that the publication of Bolton’s book had set a “dangerous precedent.”
“Unilaterally publishing consultations based on mutual trust violates the basic principles of diplomacy and could severely damage future negotiations,” said Bolton’s former South Korean counterpart.
Chung’s comments come after a week of headlines about Bolton’s allegations, who is promoting his new revelation, “The Room Where It Happened: A Memory from the White House,” due out on Tuesday.
Chung has played an important role in the denuclearization talks between the US. USA And North Korea, since he personally delivered a letter requesting a meeting with Trump of the North Korean leader.
In that letter, delivered in March 2018, Kim said he was “committed to denuclearization.”
Chung was also heavily involved in all future meetings between Kim and Trump.
But according to Bolton, South Korea’s role in the efforts did not merit much praise.
“All this diplomatic fandango was a creation of South Korea, related more to its ‘unification’ agenda than to a serious strategy on the part of Kim or ours,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Nuclear talks between the US USA And North Korea has stalled since a February 2019 meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam, between Trump and Kim.
At the summit in the Vietnamese capital, the second by Trump and Kim, the United States tried to get North Korea to accept denuclearization. Pyongyang called for the relief of sanctions. The talks finally broke down and the summit broke up.
Since that summit, North Korea has resumed test missiles.
Bolton’s nearly 600-page tome, who served as Trump’s national security adviser between April 2018 and September 2019, will be published after the Justice Department did not block him.
The effort was canceled by a federal judge, who argued that the book’s publication would be too difficult to block since at least 200,000 copies had already been distributed.
Trump has repeatedly denied Bolton’s claims and criticized him in a tweet Tuesday morning: “Creepster dragged John Bolton is a poor man who should be in jail, with money seized, to spread, for profit, information highly classified.
“Remember what they did to the young submarine sailor, but they did nothing to Crooked Hillary. I ended up forgiving him. It wasn’t fair!
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