President Donald Trump's former chief of staff
John Kelly has dismissed the U.S. president's unprecedented engagement with North Korean leader
Kim Jong Un as futile, saying he had never believed
North Korea would give up its
nuclear weapons and
Pyongyang had played the
United States to its benefit.
Kelly, a former Marine Corps general who fell out with Trump and left the
White House in December 2018, laid out his misgivings about the president's policy approaches at Drew University in New Jersey on Wednesday night, the Atlantic magazine said in a report on its website.
"He will never give his nuclear weapons up," the Atlantic quoted Kelly as saying of Kim, who Trump met three times between mid-2018 and June 2019 in fruitless attempts to persuade him otherwise.