U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will leave for North Korea on July 5 to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Monday.
Pompeo’s visit will take place less than a month after President Donald Trump’s historic meeting with Kim in Singapore.
Following their 45-minute meeting, the two sat down for a signing ceremony, putting their signatures to a document both sides described as “historic”, without revealing any details.
After the signing, Trump held a press conference at which he said the agreement included a commitment to achieve total denuclearization of Korea, with promises to pursue “vigorous negotiations” to that end.
While Trump, upon returning from the summit in Singapore, tweeted that Pyongyang “no longer” posed a nuclear threat, the White House announced in late June that North Korea remains an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States.
Pompeo last week expressed confidence that North Korea understood the scope of the U.S. desire for complete denuclearization.
“We’ve been pretty unambiguous in our conversations about what we mean when we say complete denuclearization,” Pompeo told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on funding for the State Department.
News of his trip to North Korea follows a report that Pyongyang has continued upgrading a nuclear facility, despite the agreements made between Trump and Kim.