[THE INVESTOR] Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s top foreign policy adviser blasted the Korea-US free trade agreement on July 19, calling it a “mistake” that more than doubled American trade deficits.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, who oversees Trump’s foreign policy team, has expressed deeply negative views of free trade deals, often using the pact with Korea as an example to make the case the administration of President Barack Obama duped the country into supporting deals that turned out to be bad for the US.

“I supported most of the trade deals. I supported the Korean -- when the last big one. I supported the China deal. I think they were now mistakes,” Sessions said on MSNBC. “The data came in. It was not anything close to what they promised.”

“In Korea, they promised -- when Obama signed it and I voted for it -- that we would increase exports to Korea by $10 billion a year. It was $30 million in increase last year, four years later. Whereas their imports to us were $15 billion increase. The trade deficit is more than double,” the senator said.

Sessions said that the US is a trading nation and he believes in trade, but stressed that the US shouldn’t allow its trading partners “to cheat, to manipulate the currency manipulation and other things that take jobs unfairly.”

He also said that Trump can show “we’ve had bad trade deals and how things are not working well.”

Trump has also been critical of FTAs in the past.

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