President Trump said Friday that he believes former President Obama would have gone to war with North Korea, a claim that members of Obama’s inner circle immediately denied.
Speaking during an impromptu news conference in the Rose Garden of the White House, Trump said Obama once told him he was “so close” to launching a “big war” over North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s nuclear ambitions.
“I don’t want to speak for him, but I believe he would have gone to war with North Korea,” Trump said of his predecessor.
Trump made the remarks after recounting a long meeting he had with Obama at the White House that took place shortly after Trump defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, in which Obama named Pyongyang as Washington’s greatest foreign policy challenge.
Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under Obama, tweeted after Trump spoke that “we were not on the brink of war with North Korea in 2016.”
“Highlighting the longstanding and widely known threat of North Korea’s nuclear program is very different from saying you’re about to start a big war,” he also wrote. – READ MORE