The parents of U.S. student Otto Warmbier, who died after abuse in North Korean detention, have strongly rebuked comments by President Donald Trump. After meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Trump said he took Kim at his word that he did not know what happened to Warmbier. Human rights organizations say they are “flabbergasted” by Trump’s comments, but also see a pattern. VOA’s Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports from the State Department.
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It barely registered with lawmakers during disgraced lawyer Michael Cohen’s dramatic congressional testimony Wednesday about President Donald Trump’s alleged misdeeds throughout the 2016 presidential campaign and his first year in office.

But in what could spell a major legal headache for Trump, House Democrats are investigating whether the president hid from government ethics officials hundreds of thousands of dollars he paid Cohen as part of a scheme to silence porn star Stormy Daniels about her allegations that she and Trump had an affair years before.

The investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform is part of a wide-ranging probe by newly empowered House Democrats that is gaining momentum two months after Democrats regained control of the chamber. At least three other House panels, the Intelligence, Judiciary and Ways and Means committees, are mounting related investigations of Trump and his associates. 

Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, said Trump could potentially face civil or criminal charges of submitting false or fraudulent government financial disclosure forms to hide his involvement in paying hush money during the campaign. 

‘Low-hanging fruit’

“That could be a major problem and it could be some low-hanging fruit for the Committee on Oversight and Reform to take up in going after Trump if they so choose,” Amey said. 

While the potential ethics violation has received little attention until now, some experts say it may rank in seriousness along with higher profile problems, such as allegations Trump violated campaign finance laws and colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election.

The president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has acknowledged the hush money payment but has said it did not violate campaign finance laws because it came from Trump’s personal funds rather than his campaign.

Cohen, the star witness for House and Senate investigative committees this week, pleaded guilty last year to violating federal election law by arranging hush money payments to Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal that far exceeded legal limits to campaign contributions.

Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 and arranged for a payment of $150,000 to McDougal after both women threatened to go public with their stories of sexual relations with Trump just as the Republican candidate was close to locking down his party’s nomination. Trump has denied their allegations.

Reimbursement for payments

Cohen detailed how he received $420,000 from Trump for his efforts to buy the silence of Daniels. The reimbursement included $130,000 for the hush money payment; $50,000 for “tech services” both of which were doubled for tax purposes, as well as a $60,000 bonus. The payment was spread out over 11 months to make it appear Cohen was receiving monthly payments for ongoing legal services. 

Cohen has been sentenced to three years in prison for financial crimes as well as for lying to Congress and violating campaign laws in connection with the hush money payments to the two Trump accusers.

After Cohen’s testimony Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers said the former Trump lawyer may have implicated the president in committing a crime while in office. In a report released this week, the ethics watchdog Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said Trump could potentially face eight criminal charges in connection with the hush money payments. 

In a flurry of tweets Friday, Trump blasted his former attorney as “totally discredited” and wrote that Cohen had made “fraudulent and dishonest statements” during his testimony.

In recent weeks, House Oversight Committee investigators have zeroed in on Trump’s failure to fully disclose the Cohen payments in his annual financial disclosure forms. Investigators are demanding documents from the White House and the Trump Organization, and asking the president’s lawyers to answer their questions. 

Financial disclosure requirements

All senior government officials — including the president — are required to file with the Office of Government Ethics annual financial disclosure forms, listing their assets and liabilities. OGE regulations require that each disclosure form describe liabilities in excess of $10,000 and identify the creditor. 

In his 2017 financial disclosure form, Trump left out all that information. In his 2018 form, he noted cryptically that he’d “fully reimbursed” Cohen for unspecified expenses in the amount of $100,000 to $250,000, far less than what Cohen had actually received. 

The June 2018 filing came as the hush money scandal broke and government ethics officials contacted Trump’s lawyers for an explanation, demanding the president revise his report if he owed Cohen any money in 2016. 

Notes of conversations between OGE officials and Trump lawyers in April and May 2018, and obtained by the House Oversight Committee, show the president’s attorneys struggling to offer a consistent answer. The president’s tax lawyer, Sheri Dillon, initially maintained that she did not believe that Trump owed Cohen any money in 2016. 

Later, White House ethics lawyer Stefan Passantino offered a different explanation: Cohen was allowed to charge additional expenses for providing “legal services” under a “retainer agreement.”

But Cohen has told prosecutors that there was no retainer agreement in place and that he arranged for his own reimbursement through “fraudulent invoices for nonexistent legal services … under a nonexistent retainer agreement.”

Other committee action

Now, House investigators want to talk to Passantino and Dillon. In letters sent to Dillon and Passantino just hours before Cohen’s testimony, House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings expressed concern that the two lawyers may have provided “false information” to government ethics officials reviewing Trump’s financial disclosure records. 

Passantino and Dillon did not respond to requests for comment.

Filing a false financial disclosure could result in a civil penalty, such as a fine or prosecution by the Department of Justice, although the Justice Department, as a rule, would not prosecute a sitting president. But illegally withholding information from ethics officers regarding illegal campaign finance transactions could become grounds for impeachment, if House Democratic leaders eventually decide to pursue that course of action.

“There is a likelihood President Trump violated that law when he submitted these financial disclosure forms that were either missing liabilities or misrepresenting them,” said Amey, of the Project on Government Oversight. “All of that taken as a whole could put the president in some hot water for filing a fraudulent or misleading financial disclosure statement.”
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The American team’s lack of experience in negotiating with North Koreans, as well as a lack of preparation, may have contributed to the collapse of this week’s Hanoi summit between Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump, who favors top-down diplomacy, according to experts.

The two-day summit that began Wednesday ended when Trump walked out on Thursday without a denuclearization deal or a declaration of peace to end the Korean War, a move met with approval in Washington, even though the summit began with hope of concrete agreements on denuclearization.

“Sometimes, you have to walk, and this was just one of those times,” Trump said at a press conference Thursday.

The talks broke down because, according to Trump, North Korea demanded all sanctions imposed on the country be lifted in exchange for its offer to dismantle its Yongbyon nuclear facility.

Later, at a separate press briefing in Hanoi, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho said North Korea had asked for partial sanctions relief in exchange for continuing to halt its nuclear and missile testing.

The Hanoi summit was the leaders’ second, taking place eight months after their first summit in Singapore last June, which produced a widely criticized vague agreement.

​‘Correct decision’

Experts agree that Trump did the right thing.

“I think sometimes the best deals are the ones you walk away from,” said Christopher Hill, a chief negotiator with North Korea during the George W. Bush administration.

Joseph DeTrani, a former special envoy for nuclear talks with North Korea, said, “The president made the correct decision.”

Robert Manning, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council said, “Trump … deserves credit for that moment of realism.”

But according to experts, the summit collapsed in part because Trump’s top-down style left little room for U.S. negotiators to reach agreements during working-level meetings with their North Korean counterparts who have much more experience in denuclearization talks.

Sung-yoon Lee, a professor of Korean studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, emphasized that North Korea’s “chief full-time America-handlers” average three decades of on-the-job experience, while the current U.S. negotiators have logged about 2½ years of dealing with North Korea.

“Who has the advantage?” Lee asked. Many of the State Department’s most experienced North Korea experts have retired recently from government.

The final agreement on denuclearization was left for the two leaders, who failed because “both Trump and Kim overestimated their respective ability to take the other side into a deal they wanted,” Manning said.

‘Top-down approach to negotiating’

“This was the risk you take when you do a top-down approach to negotiating,” said Dennis Wilder, the National Security Council’s senior director for East Asia affairs during the George W. Bush administration. “In other words, clearly, an agreement hadn’t been made before the men got to Hanoi.”

Wilder said Kim misjudged Trump and “overplayed his hand” and “overreached in the negotiations,” thinking that he could “get something big for putting very little on the table,” which was based on his previous experience in dealing with Trump, who was “quite easy on the North Korean leader and did not demand a great deal of him” at the first summit.

“The failure of the Hanoi summit shows the downside of top-down diplomacy,” Manning said. “I would have insisted on having the basic framework and some minimal nuclear-for-benefit trade-off agreed to before I agreed to a summit.”

Hill said, “I think it kind of speaks to some of the preparation, which I thought was inadequate.”

He added, “There needs to be a clearer understanding about [reaching agreements prior to talks] before they ask the president, before the president gets involved.”

WATCH: Failed Hanoi Summit Could Reset Productive Nuclear Talks

Wilder said U.S. negotiators probably “knew perfectly well what North Korea’s position was,” but think Trump felt his chemistry with Kim would enable him to strike a deal that perhaps he thought Special Representative for North Korea Steve Biegun and lower-level North Korean negotiators “wouldn’t have [had] the latitude” to strike.

“I think [the Trump administration] decided to somewhat gamble, to roll the dice to see what they could get,” Wilder said.

Manning, of the Atlantic Council, thinks Biegun tried to make an agreement before the summit, but that the North Korean side probably refused because Kim wanted to deal directly with Trump at the summit.

“Steve Biegun did make a major effort to learn from past Korea diplomacy, meeting with dozens of those previously involved in the diplomacy, and tried to build on the lessons,” Manning said. “But North Korea would not negotiate a minimal nuclear deal at that level because they thought Trump was a soft target.”

Hill said, “To have it just fall apart” signifies that the diplomacy was not quite ready “to be brought out of the diplomatic oven, if you will.”

‘Experience matters’

In dealing with North Korea, Manning said, “Experience matters.”

Wilder said, “On the North Korean side, you have people very, very, very expert in negotiating with the United States.” He continued, “They’ve spent their entire career doing this, whereas on the American side, they’re relatively less steeped in all of this.”

According to Korean studies professor Lee, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has two years of dealing with North Korea, and Biegun, has half a year and National Security Adviser John Bolton had five years of dealing with North Korea, including time in the George W. Bush administration. Former South Carolina Congressman Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s current acting White House chief of staff and director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, has little foreign experience.

​On the North Korean side, Minister of Foreign Affairs Ri has 35 years of dealing with the U.S., while Kim Yong Chol, head negotiator on nuclear talks, has dealt with the U.S. for 30 years. Vice Foreign Minister Choe Sun Hui has 25 years of experience with the U.S. And Kim Kye Gwan, a leading negotiator during the Six-Party talks who is also believed to be working behind the scenes advising current negotiators, has 30 years of experience with the U.S.

Going forward, Wilder thinks Trump “is going to be “a little more wary” of having another summit with Kim “without some understanding beforehand.”

He added, “So I would guess that he is now going to give Mr. Pompeo and Steve Biegun more authority to negotiate.”

As for North Korea, Lee thinks “Kim was taken aback” and is likely to “regroup and dangle another sweet carrot to Trump.”

Lee said Trump will most likely “take the bait and settle for only a partial freeze of Kim’s vast nuclear and missile programs while bomb-making goes on in other undisclosed locations.”

“For Kim, two steps forward and one step back is still progress,” Lee said.
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Washington Gov. Jay Inslee will seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, mixing calls for combating climate change and highlights of his liberal record with an aggressive critique of President Donald Trump.

The 68-year-old governor is launching his bid Friday in Seattle, following recent visits to the first primary state of New Hampshire and the early caucus state of Nevada.

“We went to the moon and created technologies that have changed the world — our country’s next mission must be to rise up to the most urgent challenge of our time: defeating climate change,” Inslee said in a video announcement ahead of a public announcement later Friday in Seattle.

Inslee is the first governor to join a Democratic primary that has been dominated by senators. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock and former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper are eyeing presidential campaigns.

It will not be easy for Inslee to garner attention with six prominent senators — Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — already running. Former Vice President Joe Biden and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke also are expected to make highly anticipated 2020 announcements in the coming weeks.

Inslee acknowledges his underdog status but says his emphasis on combating climate change will set him apart.

“Climate change is a unifying issue,” Inslee told The Associated Press in a recent interview, calling it a moral necessity and an economic opportunity.

He promises substantial investment in clean energy sources that reduce American dependence on fossil fuels.

“This issue is connected to virtually every other value system and thing we want to do in our communities,” he said, mentioning environmental justice, infrastructure, clean energy, health care and national security.

Inslee argues that no presidential candidate has hinged a campaign as heavily on climate and environmental policy as he will. He plans his first trip as a candidate to Iowa next week, with events geared to climate issues. Trips to Nevada and California will follow.

He may have a larger opening on climate since billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer has passed on a national campaign, opting instead to continue his advocacy for impeaching and removing Trump from office. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire who has spent millions of dollars on climate issues, may run.

Steyer hasn’t indicated whether he’ll use his fortune to back a presidential candidate, but he welcomed Inslee’s announcement, tweeting Friday, “It’s good to know that a climate champion like (at)GovInslee will be in the race, pushing the country to recognize what is at stake.”

Inslee has not specifically endorsed the Green New Deal introduced by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, though he said last month that he was “thrilled that this … resolution has been brought forward” as a way to push for action.

He has argued separately for an issue-by-issue approach that adds up to sweeping change. He generally avoids promising specific reductions of carbon emissions under an absolute timeframe. The Green New Deal targets 2030 for the U.S. to become net carbon neutral.

Despite his emphasis on climate policy, Inslee says he’s not a one-issue candidate. A former congressman, he pitches his breadth of personal and political experiences as ideal to bridge political and cultural divides among the Democratic base and the broader electorate.

Inslee is a white male baby boomer who was a clean-cut star athlete and honors student in the turbulent 1960s, when he met his high school sweetheart, Trudi. She is now his wife of 46 years. That puts Inslee closer to the septuagenarian Biden than to the young rock-star-style candidates like O’Rourke or Booker, both in their 40s.

Inslee has nonetheless governed Washington as an unabashed liberal, promoting clean energy, gay rights, abortion rights, environmental preservation, tighter gun restrictions and more spending for education and job training. Most recently, he’s called for a state-based public option health insurance plan in Washington that he calls a “step toward universal health care.”

Republicans have not embraced him, with the state GOP recently deriding his “extreme environmental agenda” and pointing to its price tag.

Senate Republican leader Mark Schoesler has quipped that Inslee’s policies “may be geared toward Iowa more than Washington.”

Inslee grew up in the Seattle area, with his mother working as a sales clerk and his father as a biology teacher and basketball coach in public schools. He started his legal and political career in small-town central Washington, where he won a state legislative post and, for one term, a congressional seat before being knocked out in the GOP sweep of 1994. He later returned to Congress representing a metro-Seattle district for 12 years before resigning to run for and win the governor’s office in 2012.

Inslee raised his profile serving as Democratic Governors Association chairman in 2018; Democrats picked up seven governor’s offices, and Inslee became a familiar guest to cable news audiences, using the opportunity to lambaste Trump on such issues as immigration and ethics.

“During the past two years, we’ve been challenged by federal actions that appeal more to our darker natures than our better angels,” Inslee said in his January address of the Washington Legislature. “But we know that’s not who we are.”

Recent polling suggests at least some wisdom for trying to become the climate change candidate.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from December found that self-identified liberal Democrats see the environment as a critical issue: 49 percent named it among their top priorities, compared with 29 percent of conservative and moderate Democrats. Sixteen percent of liberal and moderate Republicans and just 3 percent of conservative Republicans mentioned the environment as a major problem.
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Americans’ views of Russia have plummeted to levels not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to a newly released survey by the U.S.-based Gallup polling center.

The data say 52 percent of Americans see Russian military power as a direct threat to U.S. vital interests, and that a third identify Russia as the United States’ arch rival, thereby displacing North Korea from the top position in Gallup’s semi-annual ranking of perceived U.S. enemies.

The percentage of Americans who view Russia unfavorably also increased a single percentage point to 73 in the latest poll, a record high in Gallup’s trends.

The findings follow a January 2018 poll by the independent Moscow-based Levada Center showed that two-thirds of Russians called the United States their main enemy.

Pavel Sharikov, a senior research fellow at the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, says although the latest results are a cause for concern, the outlook may not be as bleak as it seems.

“From my perspective, both Moscow and Washington have contributed to these numbers,” he said, noting that numerous variables – from Western sanctions over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and accusations of meddling in U.S. elections, and the recent collapse of the INF weapons treaty – have sparked unprecedented levels of belligerent rhetoric.

“From the United States, there is a lot of criticism toward Russia, which Russian politicians take very seriously and very dramatically, and they react to this criticism” with escalated threats,” Sharikiv said.

“This sentiment in Russia [is] that it should remain a strong military power…the president’s and generals’ rhetoric about the Russian military being on the rise, about Russian weapons systems being so robust,” he said. “This is also what leads to Americans perceiving Russians and Russia as a military threat. So these polls are a very big concern.”

But general Russian public perceptions of the United States, Sharikov said, differ significantly from opinions held among the pro-Kremlin community. And a spate of recent polls in Russia, he added, indicate an increasingly positive perception of Americans.

“It used to be, a couple of years ago, the general Russian public opinion was that Russia and the United States are enemies, but I have looked at the recent polls of the Levada Center, and there has been a very clear trend toward a positive perception of the United States and Europe among Russians, especially among the younger generation,” he said.

“For a very long time, the negative perception of the United States was very clearly related to a very high rating of President [Vladimir] Putin, so right now there is no correlation,” he said. “And while President Putin’s ratings are very dynamic – and, right now, it’s getting lower – the general Russian public opinion is getting more positive toward the United States.”

Andrei Kolesnikov, a political analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, says general public fears of warfare expressed by people polled on “both sides of the ocean” aren’t likely to affect diplomatic ties in any significant way.

“Major political decisions are being made at a different level,” he said. “Besides, the relations between the countries are already quite poor. It just doesn’t help to improve the situation when ordinary people start thinking in a negative way.”

Outside St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg, where just days ago the choir sparked controversy with a performance of a Soviet-era satirical song about a nuclear submarine attack on the United States, locals appeared to be more nonchalant about the Gallup findings.

“This kind of published research just reinforces existing fears and biases and ultimately worsens relations,” said one young St. Petersburg resident, an engineering student, who asked to remain anonymous.

“People will believe whatever they see reported on television and online,” she said. “And, in Russia, what do they hear most about? U.S. political interference in other countries and sanctions. So of course they view the U.S. as a major enemy.”

On the streets of Moscow, too, one young professional, a psychology professor, echoed the opinion that news reports loaded with mutually antagonistic statements by U.S. and Russian officials – not to mention myriad online media threads – largely exaggerate perceptions of reciprocal enmity.

“All this gossip about Russian aggression began during Soviet times, in the mid-20th century or even earlier, and it’s never going to stop until people unplug from mass media,” he said, rolling his eyes at the mention of Gallup and Levada Center polls.

“I guess you can perceive me as an enemy if you want, but you’re perfectly safe to come have a drink with me if you like,” he added, laughing. “Thirst can be a truly dangerous thing, right?”

One Moscow-based American largely echoed that sentiment, emphasizing interpersonal connections over international relations.

“I think these polls are asking too general of a question and most people are totally politically incompetent,” said Robert, who chose to withhold his last name. “I think everyone should have a voice and democracy is a necessity but international politics isn’t a simple thing, and even experienced politicians can’t understand a lot of it – too many moving parts and cultural misunderstandings.”

Adding that he believes Russia and the United States are mutual enemies at the national level, he sees most of the conflict unfolding in geopolitical proxy disputes in places such as Syria.

“As an expat in Russia, and former expat in China and Cambodia, I don’t feel distrust or angst from locals, although they would have logical reason to feel it,” he said. “I feel different from the locals, of course, but my connection with them is on a personal level, not a political one. They realize and I realize, too, that governmental decisions are far, far removed from individual people themselves, especially in non-democratic countries like those I’ve lived in.

“I’ve spoken with people about politics in each of these countries and every one of them has shared my feelings of people connections, not political connections, between individuals,” he added.

Gallup conducted the poll among 1,016 Americans living in all 50 states between Feb. 1 and Feb. 10.

Olga Pavlova contributed to this report from Moscow.

 
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