Tag: North Korea

U.S. accuses three North Koreans of conspiring to steal more than $1.3 billion in cash and cryptocurrency

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The Justice Department unsealed charges Wednesday against three North Koreans accused of conspiring to steal and extort more than $1.3 billion in cash and cryptocurrency from banks and businesses around the world.

The indictment builds upon 2018 charges brought against one of the alleged hackers in connection with the North Korean regime’s 2014 cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, marking the first time the United States charged a Pyongyang operative.

The latest indictment shows the degree to which North Korea relies on financial cybertheft to obtain hard currency in a country whose main exports are under United Nations and U.S. sanctions, and that is further isolated by a self-imposed coronavirus blockade. The hackers managed to steal at least $190 million, according to prosecutors, who wouldn’t put an exact figure on how much was stolen. They said the North Koreans were unable to get at least $1 billion of the $1.3 billion they targeted, mostly in banks, officials said. Continue reading.

As Kim wooed Trump with ‘love letters,’ he kept building his nuclear capability, intelligence shows

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In a secret letter to President Trump in December 2018, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un likened the two leaders’ budding friendship to a Hollywood romance. Future meetings with “Your Excellency,” Kim wrote to Trump, would be “reminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film.”

Yet even as he penned the words, Kim was busy creating an illusion of a different kind. At six of the country’s missile bases, trucks hauled rock from underground construction sites as workers dug a maze of new tunnels and bunkers, allowing North Korea to move weapons around like peas in a shell game. Southeast of the capital, meanwhile, new buildings sprouted across an industrial complex that was processing uranium for as many as 15 new bombs, according to current and former U.S. and South Korean officials, as well as a report by a United Nations panel of experts.

The new work reflects a continuation of a pattern observed by analysts since the first summit between Trump and Kim in 2018. While North Korea has refrained from carrying out provocative tests of its most advanced weapon systems, it never stopped working on them, U.S. intelligence officials said. Indeed, new evidence suggests that Kim took advantage of the lull by improving his ability to hide his most powerful weapons and shield them from future attacks. Continue reading.

North Korea says it has no plans for talks with U.S.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — North Korea on Saturday reiterated it has no immediate plans to resume nuclear negotiations with the United States unless Washington discards what it describes as “hostile” polices toward Pyongyang.

The statement by North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui came after President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, told reporters in New York Thursday that Trump might seek another summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as an “October surprise” ahead of the U.S. presidential election.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who had lobbied hard to help set up the now-stalled negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang, also expressed hope that Trump and Kim would meet again before the election in a video conference with European leaders on Tuesday. Continue reading.

How North Korea’s Dictator Scammed Trump

Donald Trump had a bad week. He went to West Point to make himself look like a strong leader but raised doubts about his health when he struggled drinking water and descending a ramp. His first Supreme Court appointee wrote the opinion in a case upholding gay and transgender rights.

The court also struck down Trump’s effort to deport undocumented foreigners brought here as children. His former national security advisor wrote a book painting the world’s most powerful person as an ignorant sleazebag who was guilty of the impeachment charges and more.

Trump had to reschedule a Tulsa rally planned for Juneteenth, but he insisted on holding it the following day — risking lives in a state suffering a surge of the coronavirus. New polls showed him trailing Joe Biden by landslide margins. Continue reading.

Trump’s mortifying North Korea gambit is turning out to be one of his biggest failures

AlterNet logoWith all that’s going on in the world, it is understandable that most of us missed the second anniversary of Trump’s photo-op with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un on the demilitarized border between North and South Korea. But nothing demonstrates Trump’s utter failure as a president more than his posturing on that issue.

It all started with a lot of chest-thumping about six months after the inauguration. Trump told reporters that “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” That was followed by a lot of name-calling and insults, ending in a verbal competition over who had the biggest nuclear button.

Kim Jong Un then invited Trump to a meeting in Singapore, which took place in mid-June 2018. All of a sudden the blustering stopped, with Trump saying that the North Korean dictator was “very smart” with a “great personality.” He went on to tell Greta van Susteren that Kim “loves his people.” The meeting ended with the two leaders signing an agreement, which was nothing more substantial than a promise to negotiate. The whole event was described as a propaganda victory for Kim Jong Un. Continue reading.

South Korean military: North Korea fired unidentified projectiles

The Hill logoNorth Korea’s military launched three unidentified projectiles, South Korea’s military said early Monday morning local time.

CNBC first reported the statement from South Korea’s military. It was unclear where the launches occurred, but a statement from South Korea’s defense ministry obtained by CNN stated that three projectiles had been fired towards the Sea of Japan, where previous weapons tests have occurred.

“Our military detected three unidentified projectiles fired this morning from the Sondok area in Hamgyong Province, North Korea, toward northeast, toward the East Sea,” the South Korea Defense Ministry said, according to CNN. Continue reading.

Trump upended three decades of U.S. strategy with North Korea, but the gamble has failed to pay off

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s decision to engage directly with Kim Jong Un was premised on the bet that three decades of U.S. policy failures to contain North Korea’s nuclear program could be reversed by skipping over lower-level diplomatic talks and starting at the top of its authoritarian regime.

But 19 months after the two leaders’ first summit, the negotiations have broken down along the same sticking point as past efforts: how much sanctions relief the United States is willing to offer in exchange for how much of its arsenal Pyongyang is willing to dismantle.

Now, pressure is mounting on Trump to acknowledge that his strategy has failed and to change course, amid renewed warnings from Kim this week that the North would soon unveil a “new strategic weapon,” which analysts said could mean a long-range ballistic missile test. Diplomatic engagement has been dormant for months, and the Kim regime, frustrated by the stalemate, has publicly rejected Trump’s suggestion that the two leaders could soon meet for a fourth time. Continue reading

Trump Bet He Could Isolate Iran and Charm North Korea. It’s Not That Easy.

New York Times logoThe president assumed economic levers would guide the countries’ national interests. Now, he confronts twin challenges in an election year.

President Trump entered the new year facing flare-ups of long-burning crises with two old adversaries — Iran and North Korea — that are directly challenging his claim to have reasserted American power around the world.

While the Iranian-backed attack on the United States Embassy in Baghdad seemed to be under control, it played to Mr. Trump’s longtime worry that American diplomats and troops in the Middle East are easy targets and his longtime position that the United States must pull back from the region.

In North Korea, Kim Jong-un’s declaration on Wednesday that the world would “witness a new strategic weapon” seemed to be the end of an 18-month experiment in which Mr. Trump believed his force of personality — and vague promises of economic development — would wipe away a problem that plagued the last 12 of his predecessors. Continue reading

As North Korea Shows, Trump Is An Awful Negotiator

I’m starting to wonder if Donald Trump, bestselling author of The Art of the Deal, just isn’t very good at making deals. His presidency has been a ceaseless torrent of promises about what he’ll achieve from negotiations with foreign leaders. But time and again, he ends up high and dry.

Right now, the administration is waiting to find out what the North Korean regime meant when it made the ominous vow to give the United States a “Christmas gift” if talks didn’t produce an agreement on nuclear weapons and economic sanctions by year’s end. No such accord has been reached, which confirms the bankruptcy of Trump’s strategy.

He started out in 2017 by threatening Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury” if he made threats. But then the two agreed to a 2018 meeting in Singapore — a made-for-TV spectacle that produced an agreement short on meaningful specifics. About all Trump got in return for giving Kim the propaganda opportunity was a halt in missile tests and the purported demolition of a test site. Continue reading

How Trump’s North Korea nuclear talks gambit came undone

Washington Post logoSEOUL — When President Trump walked out of his first summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June 2018, his confidence was sky high. Trump claimed he knew “for a fact” that Kim would go home to start a process that “will make a lot of people very happy and very safe.”

Since then, North Korea has carried out more than a dozen missile and rocket tests, says denuclearization is no longer on the negotiating table, has called Trump an erratic “dotard” and has threatened to deliver an unwelcome “Christmas gift.”

Many lay blame on the North Korean regime, arguing it was never serious about dismantling its nuclear arsenal and presented an unrealistic set of demands when Trump met Kim for a second time in Hanoi in February.

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