This afternoon, Chairman Royce appeared on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper from the United Nations to talk about the urgent threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Key excerpts below:

“…Our biggest challenge right now is applying full diplomatic and financial pressure on North Korea and getting compliance from these other countries to do it. This is a hydrogen bomb that they have at their disposal. And so, this is a response by our president to focus full pressure – full diplomatic and financial pressure. We need compliance with these sanctions.”

“We know from 2005, Jake, that when we put financial sanctions, on the banks in China that were necessary for the support of the system in North Korea, that the dictator at that time could not pay his generals and they did not have the money for their ICBM program. And they had to discontinue … that program. We need to do that again. That’s what these sanctions are intended to do. We need the China Merchant Bank and we need the Agricultural Bank of China, the state-owned bank, to … comply with these sanctions and we should give them a choice between doing business with us or North Korea. We’re headed in that direction by sending this message. Because if we do that, we ultimately have the leverage on North Korea to once again get them to the table or get them into compliance. Until we do that, we do not.”

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