“Turning the enthusiasm of the meeting in Singapore into a concrete, verifiable agreement is now the job of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is leaving Washington early Thursday for North Korea. It will be his third trip there, but the first to flesh out a timetable and a common understanding of what the Singapore commitment to ‘work toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula’ really means,” the New York Times reports.

“Complicating the task is this: Mr. Pompeo, a former C.I.A. chief who knows the details of the North Korean program intimately and has solicited plans for how to accomplish his goals, must show that he can get the North Koreans to go far beyond the agreement his predecessor once-removed, John Kerry, achieved in negotiations with Iran.”

Mike Allen: “Some administration officials are so optimistic about making progress with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un that they hope a Round 2 with President Trump can be held in New York in September, when world leaders pour into Trump’s hometown for the U.N. General Assembly.”

“Officials tell us that Kim would have to show progress for the meeting to occur. One possibility would be for Trump to hold out a Round 2 meeting as a carrot to encourage real movement by North Korea over the summer.”

“U.S. intelligence agencies believe that North Korea has increased its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months — and that Kim Jong Un may try to hide those facilities as he seeks more concessions in nuclear talks with the Trump administration,” NBC News reports.

“The intelligence assessment, which has not previously been reported, seems to counter the sentiments expressed by President Trump, who tweeted after his historic June 12 summit with Kim that ‘there was no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.'”

“Satellite images from last week show that North Korea is making numerous improvements to the infrastructure at a nuclear research facility,” The Hill reports.

“The images, obtained by North Korea analysis outlet 38 North, come just weeks after President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed an agreement that called for a denuclearized Korean peninsula.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNN he would not put a timeline on negotiations with North Korea, but said the Trump administration will regularly assess the regime’s seriousness about abandoning its nuclear program as the US moves toward normalizing relations with Pyongyang.

President Trump told Congress in a letter that North Korea’s “provocative, destabilizing, and repressive actions… continue to constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States, the Daily Beast reports.

The letter comes just over a week after Trump boasted on Twitter that there “is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea” and that “everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office.”

North Korean state media released new behind-the-scenes footage of President Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un, showing Trump saluting a North Korean General.

Fox News anchor Shepard Smith was not impressed by President Trump’s performance at the summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

From the Wall Street Journal in January:

Around the same time, Mr. Trump had an idea about how to counter the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, which he got after speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin: If the U.S. stopped joint military exercises with the South Koreans, it could help moderate Kim Jong Un’s behavior.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis used an approach that aides say can work: “He says, ‘Your instincts are absolutely correct,’ and then gets him [the president] to do the exact opposite of what his instincts say,” said one person close to the White House. Mr. Trump dropped the idea, although he has ordered aides to give the exercises a low profile, eliminating press releases and briefings about them.

According to reports, the Pentagon did not know Trump would promise to stop the military exercises with South Korea at his summit with Kim this week.

Associated Press: “Though Trump is far from the first U.S. president to work with an unsavory counterpart to achieve a strategic goal, his decision to broadcast that he tacitly accepts Kim’s history of atrocities was a sharp break from the position of presidents from both parties to set America as the exemplar shining city on a hill for other nations to emulate.”

North Korean state media said on Wednesday that President Trump had agreed to lift sanctions against the North in addition to providing security guarantees in the summit with the North’s leader, Kim Jong Un, Reuters reports.

“Scientifically, I’ve been watching and reading a lot of this. And it does take a long time to pull off complete denuclearization. It takes a long time. Scientifically, you have to wait certain periods of time, and a lot of things happen. But despite that, once you start the process, it means it’s pretty much over. Can’t use them, that’s the good news. That’s going to start very soon. I believe that’s going to start very soon. We will do it as fast as it can mechanically and physically be done.”

— President Trump, explaining the timetable agreed upon for “de-nuking” North Korea.

President Trump said that he doesn’t need any transcript or notes from his summit meeting with North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un because he has “one of the great memories of all times,” The Hill reports.

“When asked by a reporter if he had notes to verify details after the meeting in Singapore, Trump said he didn’t need to.”

Said Trump: “I don’t have to verify because I have one of the great memories of all time.”