WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump scheduled a dinner for Wednesday with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un at their summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, but only after House Democrats announced that his former lawyer and “fixer” would publicly testify on Capitol Hill at about the same time.

The apparent “counterprogramming” of Michael Cohen’s expected damaging testimony concerns arms control and national security experts, who fear that Trump is trying to distract public attention from Cohen, even at the cost of U.S. interests.

“I’m shocked ― shocked ― that this White House would contour its foreign policy around an unfolding domestic scandal,” joked Ned Price, a former CIA analyst and a National Security Council spokesman under then-President Barack Obama. “In this case, we see the president’s domestic troubles literally driving his actions on the world stage.”

Arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis said he is not merely concerned about Trump unwisely giving Kim concessions ― he is convinced it will happen. “The engagement with North Korea is driven entirely by having a positive news story to distract from negative news at home,” said Lewis, director of the East Asia program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “That’s why the president is willing to look the other way as North Korea continues to build nuclear weapons and ICBMs.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to comment on the dinner’s timing.

She did issue a statement about Cohen on Tuesday, calling him a “disgraced felon”: “It’s laughable that anyone would take a convicted liar like Cohen at his word, and pathetic to see him given yet another opportunity to spread his lies.”

Cohen was a personal lawyer to Trump and top adviser to Trump’s family business before he pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with federal investigations into his former boss. Speaking before the House oversight committee, he is expected to provide details of Trump’s business and personal dealings, including his involvement in paying hush money to a porn star as well as his attempts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow with the help of Russian leader Vladimir Putin even as he ran for U.S. president in 2016.

Trump arrived in Hanoi in the evening hours of Tuesday local time, or Tuesday morning in the United States. The White House originally had planned for the first full day of his visit to consist of late morning and afternoon meetings with Vietnamese officials and the second day to be his “summit” with Kim.

White House officials always caution that preliminary schedules, particularly those for foreign trips, are subject to change, up until the last minute. But in this case, it appears the change did not start to take place until after the House oversight committee announced on the afternoon of Feb. 20 that Cohen would appear in open session. The dinner with Kim, preceded by a short one-on-one meeting, was only disclosed by Sanders during a Monday night refueling stop by Air Force One on its flight to Vietnam.

Perhaps relatedly, the addition of the dinner with Kim also decreases the amount of time that Trump will have to sit in his hotel room and post statements on Twitter in the hours leading to Cohen’s testimony.