A big week in foreign policy means a Sunday show line-up dominated by the White House’s top natsec officials. The headliner is John Bolton, who I believe is making his Sunday-morning debut as NSA. He’ll be on “This Week” and “State of the Union” to discuss Trump’s pullout from the Iran nuclear deal and the coming summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore. Defending the Iran decision is easy, as tearing up the agreement was always Bolton’s own preferred position. Defending the summit will be harder. For months before joining Trump’s team he claimed that diplomacy with North Korea is pointless; last fall, with characteristic brio, he insisted that “The only diplomatic option left is to end the North Korean regime by effectively having the South take it over.” Expect him to be confronted with those comments this morning.
The other natsec honcho scheduled is Mike Pompeo, who’ll sit down with “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday” to address the same topics but with more of an emphasis on his own travels. Pompeo, after all, has met Kim personally twice now and successfully negotiated the release of the three American hostages. He’ll be grilled on what it’s like to be face to face with the dictator haggling over prisoners and what it was like on the plane ride home with the freed Americans.
Elsewhere, Lindsey Graham will follow Pompeo on the “Face the Nation” to talk about his buddy John McCain and the various nastiness, including from White House staffers, aimed at him lately as he fights cancer. The full line-up is at the AP.
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