US ‘Armada’ Turns Toward North Korea as WH Defends Misleading Remarks

Local Editor

The White House stood by President Donald Trump's recent talk of a Navy strike force on its way to the Korean peninsula, after the USS Carl Vinson was spotted thousands of miles away, headed in the opposite direction. The fleet has since turned around.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer denied that Trump misled the public about the location of the USS Carl Vinson strike force, which he said was heading to North Korea during an interview with Fox News earlier this month.

"We have submarines. Very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier, that I can tell you," Trump told Maria Bartiromo in a pre-taped interview that aired April 12.

Several tweets from Trump at the time also signaled that rising tensions were leading to the US taking action against North Korea over the country's nuclear program.

On April 11, Spicer confirmed that the Vinson strike force was "steaming out toward the Sea of Japan" to give the president "options in the region."

"I think when you see a carrier group steaming into an area like that, the forward presence of that is clearly, through almost every instance, a huge deterrence. So I think it serves multiple capabilities," Spicer said, according to the White House.

That same day, US War Secretary James Mattis added to the confusion when he told reporters that the strike group was on its way to the Sea of Japan, but added, "There's not a specific demand signal or specific reason why we're sending her up there," according to the Department of Defense website.

On April 15, the Navy posted a photograph to Flickr with a description that said the USS Carl Vinson was heading through the Sunda Strait, putting it several hundred miles south of Singapore, around 3,500 miles from the Korean Peninsula.

On Wednesday, Spicer denied that the Trump administration misled or failed to correct the reports that the Vinson strike force was en route to North Korea.

"The president said that we have an armada going toward the peninsula. That's a fact. It happened. It is happening, rather," Spicer said during a press briefing.

Pressed by reporters as to why the White House did not clarify the conflicting information, Spicer said that his statements were not false.

"I think we were asked very clearly about the use of a carrier group in terms of deterrence and foreign presence and what that meant. That's what we discussed," Spicer told reporters.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team