Page 8 - Tillerson Statement News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Way to try to keep a lid on tensions, to not escalate things further and to not give any further oxygen or attention to kim jong-un for this attempt by elevating it to the level of the most powerful person in the world, the president of the united states. the defense secretary has a clear lane to put on a statement saying that the president and the military advisors, his team, are aware of what took place and the president would have no statement. that is about as muted as you can get for something that happens on a holiday weekend, saturday night, involving a cabinet level official. i think t...

No statement under the president's name. not even from the desk of the white house. instead coming from the department of defense, jim mattis, the secretary of defense. that's a different kind of strategy, one that senior advisors had suggested to me earlier was the likely approach and it really does turn down some of the angst on the global stage or perhaps taking some of the sort of response down to a level that is a bit more in line with what took place here. not that the north korean attempts are not grave and of serious concern, but as things go now perhaps this approach is just sort of p...

Are aware of north korea's most resents unsuccessful missile launch. the president has no further comments. is this widely seen as we're not going to give kim jong-un satisfaction this is of any consequence to a greater degree to the united states and we are still monitoring and we're aware of what's happening. is that the takeaway? >> reporter: that seems like a fair interpretation. this statement from mattis is similar to the statement we had from the secretary of state tillerson so we have this mattis statement and this tillerson statement very similar. the tillerson one was from two weeks ...

Eastern time where they expect the vice president's aircraft to reach its destination in seoul. we're also told -- i mentioned earlier that statemeometimes a statement is only in paper form and sometimes it's an on camera appearance by the president. the paper only is what is expected. that too should be an indication of the level of seriousness they are giving this in the grand sweep of the developments and tensions that exist. paper only. the president will not be making an on camera statement. nothing is expected to change in his schedule tonight. of course, we follow this minute-by-minute,...

There in. more information. we understand the secretary of defense we were just reading moments ago here did come out with a statement. do you have more? >> reporter: i think what's interesting is the posture that the white house and the trump administration has taken on this. there's been so much build up about what would kim jong-un do. now that the dust has settled on this failed launch attempt, everyone has been briefed and assessments have been made and then comes the place where the white house had some latitude. how will it respond? in this brief statement that says that donald trump wi...