…As CIA report says North Korea won’t denuclearize, but might open a burger joint***

Facing impeachment over an extramarital affair and campaign finance inquiry, Missouri Governor Eric Greitens has announced he will quit on Friday.

The first-term governor was considered a rising Republican star until allegations emerged he had photographed a naked woman without her consent.

The ex-Navy Seal called the allegations a “political witch hunt”.

The Rhodes scholar and father-of-two presented himself as a family man during his 2016 campaign.

The Missouri General Assembly, which is controlled by the governor’s own party, has been considering whether he should be impeached.

What did Greitens say?

“The last few months have been incredibly difficult, for me, for my family, for my team, for my friends and for many, many people that I love,” the 44-year-old said at Tuesday’s news conference.

He added: “This ordeal has been designed to cause an incredible amount of strain on my family.”

Mr Greitens said he had not broken any laws.

He concluded: “For the moment let us walk off the battlefield with our heads held high.

“We have a good and proud story to tell our children.”

Lieutenant Governor Mike Parson, also a Republican, is taking over as the state’s top politician.

What’s the fundraising controversy?

He was charged last month with felony computer data tampering to obtain a donor list for a veterans’ charity he founded in 2007 without permission for his own political gain.

Earlier on Tuesday, a court ruling added to Mr Greitens’ problems.

A judge gave the governor’s political non-profit group, A New Missouri, until Friday to turn over communications between it and Mr Greitens’ office.

Investigators are looking into whether his campaign illegally co-ordinated with A New Missouri to conceal donors by using shell companies to funnel money.

According to the Kansas City Star, Mr Greitens received $6m (£4.5m) in “dark money” for his 2016 campaign.

Also on Tuesday, an ex-Greitens adviser told a state House investigative panel that the governor’s election campaign had considered illegally soliciting donations from foreign nationals, reports the St Louis Post-Dispatch.

What was the sex scandal?

Earlier this year, it emerged that Mr Greitens had had an extramarital affair with his hairdresser.

A man secretly recorded his wife admitting in March 2015 to the liaisons with Mr Greitens.

The hair stylist alleged that Mr Greitens had taken a photo of her when she was partially nude without her permission and threatened to release the image if she ever told anyone about the affair.

Mr Greitens said he had worked through the adultery with his wife, but denied blackmailing the other woman.

The governor was indicted in February with invasion of privacy, but the charge was dropped this month.

In the meantime, a new U.S. intelligence assessment has concluded that North Korea does not intend to give up its nuclear weapons any time soon, three U.S. officials told NBC News — a finding that conflicts with recent statements by President Donald Trump that Pyongyang intends to do so in the future.

Trump is continuing to pursue a nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Uneven though the CIA analysis, which is consistent with other expert opinion, casts doubt on the viability of Trump’s stated goal for the negotiations, the elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

“Everybody knows they are not going to denuclearize,” said one intelligence official who read the report, which was circulated earlier this month, days before Trump canceled the originally scheduled summit.

In an odd twist, a list of potential concessions by North Korea in the CIA analysis included the possibility that Kim Jong Un may consider offering to open a Western hamburger franchise in Pyongyang as a show of goodwill, according to three national security officials.

It suggests Kim is interested in a peaceful gesture to an American president whose love of fast-food burgers is well known — and who, during the 2016 campaign, had said he wanted to talk nukes over a burger with the North Korean leader.

On the nuclear question, the analysis suggests that a more realistic immediate objective would be convincing Kim to walk back recent progress on the country’s nuclear weapons program, the officials said.

But it’s not clear that would pass muster with Trump — or America’s allies.

“If the North Koreans don’t agree in a joint statement that lays out denuclearization — that is, getting rid of their nuclear weapons, having them put under control by international elements — then I don’t think we are going to go very far,” Chris Hill, a former ambassador to South Korea, said Tuesday on MSNBC.

On May 24, Trump canceled the summit, originally scheduled for June 12, but in recent days has suggested he may participate in the summit after all. A U.S. delegation met in recent days with North Koreans officials in the Demilitarized Zone, and a senior North Korean intelligence official is en route to New York City to discuss a potential summit.

The CIA report came as a top nuclear expert argued in a new paper that the nuclear disarmament process in North Korea could take as a long as 15 years. Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford professor who once directed the federal government’s Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico — and who has toured North Korean nuclear facilities four times — argued that the sprawling nature of the North Korean program means it will take a long time to dismantle. His analysis was first reported in The New York Times.

The CIA report, described by three officials to NBC News, lays out a series of incentives the U.S. and South Korea could offer North Korea to disarm, including infrastructure and agricultural aid.

BBC with additional report from NBC