President Donald Trump tweeted last week that he was reversing certain sanctions that had been placed on North Korea by his administration.
But the tweet has actually not altered anything on the ground, a senior Pentagon official said Wednesday.
“As I understand it, none of the sanctions have been removed or changed since the tweet,” Randall Schriver, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific securities affairs, told a House Armed Services Committee hearing.
Initial reports last week said Trump was seeking to reverse Treasury Department sanctions on two Chinese companies that had been trading with North Korea.
That report rattled former Treasury officials, who said reversing the agency’s decision would undermine the U.S. government’s policy to denuclearize the reclusive Asian country.
Read: Trump’s reversal of North Korea sanctions is ‘a scandal,’ former Treasury official says
Over the weekend there were conflicting news accounts about what North Korea sanctions Trump was actually referring to. Some reports, quoting unidentified government officials, said Trump was actually talking about a new set of North Korea sanctions under development.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Trump really did intend to reverse sanctions imposed on the two Chinese shipping companies. The report said White House officials persuaded him to back off and then devised a misleading explanation of his tweet.
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