korean official. not one sanctioned like this visitor or one as high a level now, the vice charmin of the workers, ruling party for the regime, but the real point man for for kim jong-un and, in fact, the counterpart, if you will, of secretary pompeo. the previous meeting was in october of 2000, it was with bill clinton, and it was enough to justify madeleine albright taking her team and the press pool i was in it to pyongyang. it was the heist raighest ranki official to viscid until secretary pompeo did. sitting official. former presidents, jimmy carter, bill clinton, to bring back american hostages, but this is through the oval window, right? yes. and we can t make out whether that s actually president trump sitting in that chair there, but we do know that president
well, it is, first of all an unprecedented meeting. this is so much more than the photo opportunity in the oval office between bill clinton when they were in the midst of negotiating there was a negotiating track with north korea. they were working towards normalization. it signalled that madeleine albright was going in october of 2000 as we went to pyongyang for those first talks, which would have led to a possible normalization of diplomatic relations and an end to the korean war had al gore won the president and had the supreme court decision not gone in favor of george w. bush who reversed all of that. we later discovered north korea was cheating and had a concrete nuclear program they had not yet declared. there are so many warning signs along the way. here you have this president who had been so strongly aggressively against north korea fire and fury, all of the threats that we heard up through and concluding january 2nd of this year.
what can we gelinas we look at their heavily secured arrivals. what can we glean from this? it is so interesting. last time there was a high level of this caliber in the united states, it was october of 2000. bill clinton was considering normalizing relations with north korea. madeleine albright was there. and clinton later told us, after that they said they regretted they didn t move more quickly. because then they lost the election to the decision of the supreme court that it was george w. bush s and he had a completely different policy. they thought the moment was lost. they did not know that north korea was cheating and not fully
what is the russia story? i just always hope, will mueller get to the bottom of this? will we some day know what we re talking about when we say those words, the russia story. from washington, author and nbc news presidential historian michael beschloss. and in houston, nbc news chief foreign affairs correspondent andrea mitchell. andrea, we ll get to the passing of barbara bush in just a moment. but given your expertise, i want to get your take on this meeting between mike pompeo, the cia director, nominee to be secretary of state, inside north korea with north korean dictator kim jong-un. the president of the united states confirming that that meeting took place this morning on twitter. what s the significance here? oh, it s enormous. this is the highest level meeting since madelyn albright in october of 2000 went to pyongyang. i was on that trip. that was the meeting with kim jong-un s father, kim jong-il. and they were actually moving towards normalization. not ending the armis
lawrence wilkerson. what do you make of the idea that donald trump apparently decided after just 45 minutes of consideration that he would grant the dictator in north korea something that the kims have been looking for 20 years from american presidents and heretofore not granted? at least 50 years and three kims. i was just up in new york in great neck with a jewish congregation up there led by a pillar of new york. this was the number one issue on their mind. what i told them was let s look back at history. this is nothing new. this it s probably new to donald trump because he doesn t do history. madelyn albright was in pyongyang in october of 2000. she met with the father of kim jong-un for over six hours, three hours of which was intense