Democratic lawmakers leading key House national security committees on Thursday accused President Donald Trump of keeping Congress in the dark about his administration’s talks with North Korea and the state of the regime’s nuclear weapons program, NBC News informs.
“There is no legitimate reason for having failed to provide regular, senior-level briefings to the relevant committees of jurisdiction on a matter of such significance to our national security,” Representatives Eliot Engel, Adam Smith and Adam Schiff, chairmen of the House foreign affairs, intelligence and armed services committees, wrote in a letter to the President.
The lawmakers said “our ability to conduct oversight of U.S. policy toward North Korea on behalf of the American people has been inappropriately curtailed by your administration’s unwillingness to share information with Congress.”
Trump plans to head to the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi next week for a second meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. But the Democratic lawmakers said Congress has yet to have been briefed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on what transpired at the last summit between the two heads of state in Singapore in June last year.
Democrats in the Senate have been frustrated for some time over the frequency of briefings from the administration, a staffer told NBC News.
But the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, disagreed.
The senator “communicates with the State Department, the National Security Council, and the White House regularly on this issue, even as recently as this week,” spokesperson Kaylin Minton said in an email. “So needless to say, he has a different view.”
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