Overnight Defense

Overnight Defense: North Koreans scrapped secret meeting with Pence | Budget chair presses Mattis on Pentagon audit | Shulkin rooting out ‘subversion’ at VA

by Rebecca Kheel 02/21/18 05:51 PM ET

THE TOPLINE: White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders will join a delegation led by Ivanka Trump for the close of the Winter Olympics with weekend, but no meeting with North Korea will happen, the White House said Wednesday.

The announcement comes a day after Vice President Pence’s office confirmed that a planned secret meeting with North Korea when he was in the South was scrapped at the last minute.

Huckabee Sanders is scheduled to leave for South Korea on Thursday and will return to Washington next week. A White House official told reporters on a background call that the delegation will be there to cheer on Team USA and female athletes and that no meeting with North Korea is planned.

WHAT HAPPENED WITH PENCE: During Pence’s travels in Asia leading up to the Olympics, he was notably coy about whether he would meet with the North Korea delegation while at the games.

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Ultimately, his trip came and went without a meeting. But on Tuesday night, his office revealed that a meeting was in fact planned.

In a Pence aide’s telling, first reported by The Washington Post, the North cancelled the secret face-to-face between Pence, Kim Jong Un’s sister and Kim Yong Nam, North Korea’s nominal head of state, because of Pence’s tough-on-Pyongyang rhetoric during his trip.

“North Korea dangled a meeting in hopes of the vice president softening his message, which would have ceded the world stage for their propaganda during the Olympics,” Nick Ayers, the vice president’s chief of staff, said in a statement.

BUDGET CHAIRMAN WANTS ANSWERS ON PENTAGON AUDIT: The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee is pushing the Pentagon for more details on the costs and timeline of its first department-wide audit.

“To provide for our common defense in the new era of strategic competition heralded in the 2018 National Defense Strategy, we must fundamentally reform the Department of Defense,” Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis released publicly Wednesday. “As we do so, taxpayers must have trust and confidence that their hard-earned dollars are being spent wisely.”

In December, the Pentagon launched the first full-scale audit in its history, a congressionally mandated undertaking that officials have hailed as a sign of their commitment to spending their multibillion-dollar budget wisely.

Asked about upfront costs at a congressional hearing last month, Pentagon comptroller David Norquist said the audit would cost $367 million in fiscal 2018 and an additional $551 million to fix identified problems.