North Korea Denies Any Communication With Washington

Brendan Smialowski/Getty Donald Trump’s attempt to curry favor with Kim Jong Un received an embarrassing response from Pyongyang.

Trump, who radically cut joint military drills between the U.S. and South Korea while bragging about his “very good relationship” with Kim, suggested this week that he is secretly negotiating with the dictator and planned to meet with him this year.

In response, Kim Yo Jong—the North Korean leader’s sister and a top adviser—dismissed outright any talk of correspondence.

“As for reports coming out of Washington that there has recently been communication between the leaders of North Korea and the United States, I know absolutely nothing about it, and it would probably be the only matter related to our supreme leadership’s foreign policy of which I am unaware,” she said Wednesday.

She added that Trump’s move is “not even worth commenting on” and that cutting the drills does not cut their “provocative and aggressive” nature, the FT reports.

The situation escalated hours later when Pyongyang launched around 10 short-range ballistic missiles into the sea, South Korea’s military said Thursday.

Trump is gunning to revisit talks with North Korea after meeting with Kim Jong Un three times during his first term in a bid to denuclearize the Hermit Kingdom.

His need for a diplomatic win has only become more urgent as the president now barrels toward midterm elections overshadowed by his ongoing war with Iran over its nuclear program.

The U.S. president pledged that conflict would last a “few weeks” when he started it in February.

Almost six months later, there’s no end in sight, and the president has privately admitted he might have to abandon his demands about Tehran’s nuclear capabilities altogether.

His latest overtures to the Kim regime have included canceling two major annual joint military exercises with South Korea.

He said on Monday that continuing with those drills, which North Korea has always decried as practice runs for an invasion, would have been “inappropriate and hostile.” The exercises remain ongoing but will now end by Friday, six days ahead of schedule.

“If the U.S. side calculates that it can portray the measures it has recently taken as some kind of ‘goodwill gesture,’ it will not get the response it wants,” Kim Yo Jong said in her Wednesday statement.

She did, however, throw a consolation prize the president’s way, reassuring him that her brother, totalitarian leader of the country with one of the absolute worst human rights records on the planet, holds “fond personal memories and feelings” from their earlier meetings.