WASHINGTON – Maybe Kristi Noem should just put the pen down.
For the second time in a week, the glamorous South Dakota governor has made shocking claims in her upcoming book, “No Going Back” — this time, that she met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un while a member of Congress.
The only problem? It never happened, The Post has confirmed.
In a galley excerpt obtained by The Post, the 52-year-old Noem includes Kim in a laundry list of world leaders she claims to have come face-to-face with, either while governor or while serving in the House of Representatives for eight years.
“I’m sure he underestimated me,” Noem writes of Kim, who has ruled North Korea with an iron fist since 2011, “having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all.).”
Noem writes that the meeting took place while she was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, on which she served from 2013 to 2015.
However, Kim did not leave the confines of North Korea while in office until 2018, and there is no evidence of any member of Congress publicly or secretly traveling to the Hermit Kingdom during the period specified by Noem.
“I don’t see any conceivable way that a single junior member of Congress without explicit escort from the US State Department and military would be meeting with a leader from North Korea,” George A. Lopez, a North Korea expert and professor at the University of Notre Dame, told The Dakota Scout, which first reported on Noem’s questionable Kim claim.
“There’s no way,” Benjamin Young, another prominent observer of North Korea and an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, told the outlet. “There’s no way.”
Noem also raised eyebrows among veteran North Korea watchers by referring to Kim as “president,” when his formal title is “chairman.”
When contacted by The Post Thursday, Noem spokesman Ian Fury initially said the governor “will not be discussing the details of her meetings with world leaders,”
“If she wanted to share those, she would have outlined them in the book,” he added.
Several hours later, Fury sent an additional response, saying that Noem’s publisher “will be addressing conflated world leaders’ names in the book before it is released.”
In addition to Kim, Noem said she had met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The latest controversy comes less than a week after Noem all but killed her chances at becoming former President Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate by admitting in the same book that she executed a 14-month-old dog named Cricket that Noem says she “hated” in part because it was “untrainable” as a hunting dog.
While Trump has not spoken publicly about Noem’s claims, she faced fierce backlash from Republicans and Democrats alike when the news broke.
The post Kristi Noem falsely claims she met Kim Jong Un in new book appeared first on New York Post.
