OTHER DEVELOPMENTS

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS

Weeks before his planned North Korea summit, President Donald Trump is staring down a dealmaker’s worst nightmare: overpromising and under-delivering. As the Singapore meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un draws near, the president and his allies are growing increasingly anxious about how he can score a win on the world stage. While Trump has not suggested he wants to back out, he has struggled to define his objectives for the historic sit-down and last week he drew fresh criticism from his foreign foil.

In a yearlong pursuit of money and influence, two American businessmen played Middle East countries against each other, as they leveraged connections stretching from Persian Gulf palaces to the Oval Office into millions of dollars in contracts. An investigation by The Associated Press found that fundraiser Elliott Broidy and George Nader, an adviser to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, pushed the interests of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates at the highest levels of the U.S. government. As they angled for lucrative contracts, they passed messages purportedly from princes of the two Gulf countries to Trump.

New CIA Director Gina Haspel pledged to send more spies into the field during her swearing-in Monday as Trump offered up praise for the rank-and-file, who felt snubbed during his first visit to the headquarters of the premier U.S. intelligence agency. “We must learn from the past, but we cannot dwell in the past,” said Haspel, whose ascent from undercover operative to the top job was challenged because of her role in a program to harshly detain and interrogate terror suspects after 9/11.

The man who stormed Trump’s Miami-area golf resort last week has been moved from a hospital to a Florida jail. Miami-Dade County jail records show 42-year-old Jonathan Oddi of Doral was booked Sunday evening.

Source: Associated Press