President Trump’s belief that North Korea leader Kim Jong Un was unaware of the torture of American hostage Otto Warmbier has been undermined by previously-unreported court testimony.
Talking in Vietnam on Thursday about Kim’s role in the fate of Warmbier, who died in June 2017, Trump said: “He felt badly about it. He felt very badly.” He added that the two leaders had discussed Warmbier’s death privately. He added: “He tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.”
Warmbier, then 21, was arrested in North Korea in January 2016 after allegedly trying to steal a propaganda poster. He made a forced confession and was sentenced to 15 years in prison while in North Korean custody, he was tortured and suffered a traumatic brain injury. He was returned to the United States in June 2017 in a comatose state. He never regained consciousness and died at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center that month.
In December 2018, Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court of D.C. ordered the North Korean government to pay $501 million in damages to the Warmbier family.
Her ruling was based on an evidentiary hearing that lasted more than four hours. The transcript of the hearing, where expert witnesses described the culpability of the North Korean state in Otto death, has been obtained by the Washington Examiner.
[Also read: Rick Santorum slams Trump for providing ‘cover’ to Kim Jong Un on Otto Warmbier death]
Sung-Yoon Lee, a Korea specialist at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and David Hawk, a consultant for the Committee on North Korean Human Rights who teaches at the University of South Florida, both testified that the North Korean government was responsible for the torture and death of Otto.
Sung-Yoon Lee said: “North Korea had been planning to conduct various provocative weapons tests all along, and to have a young American detainee would have provided North Korea not only with an added layer of security, a security blanket, but have a useful pawn with which North Korea could compel the U.S.” He added that “hostage-taking is a very well-honed craft and tool of North Korea’s diplomacy.”
Lee said Otto’s detention was a strategic decision by the North Korean government: “I see calculated provocation, hostage taking as North Korea is preparing for a major provocation like its first nuclear test in three years, its first long-range missile test in three years.”
Lee also agreed with the judge’s statement that “North Korea seized and maintained custody of Otto in order to further its policy goals.” He said that Otto was seized during a presidential election year in the United States and at a time when North Korea hadn’t tested a nuclear weapon in three years.
Yet “just four days after detaining Otto Warmbier, North Korea conducted a nuclear test on Jan. 6, which is two days shy of Kim Jong Un’s birthday.” And the “show trial and confession” of Otto was “very much a staple mode of operation in the North Korean system.”
Lee said: “Kim Jong Un is the Supreme Leader… In Korean culture, Korean history, the man on top has always held supreme power, the Korean kings of the past.” North Korea was “the most advanced, most perfected totalitarian state in world history” and had a unique ability “to coerce, to control, to terrorize people, and to invade their private realm.”
David Hawk spoke about the “systemic and regularized torture in the initial places of detention and interrogation” in North Korea. He was clearly being interrogated, and they wanted a confession from him. And he was obviously in his testimony scared for his life if he didn’t confess to hostile acts taken on behalf of the U.S. government.”
Warmbier’s father Fred said the State Department believed Otto was being used by the North Korean government, saying the family was “advised by the State Department early on that they’re going to want something for Otto.” The “common theme” from the State Department was the North Koreans “want something, they’re going to use him, and then this will all end.”
Warmbier’s parents said in a statement after Trump’s Vietnam comments: “Kim and his evil regime are responsible for the death of our son Otto… No excuses or lavish praise can change that.”
Commenting on Trump’s remarks, Hawk told the Washington Examiner: “Immediately, the relevant security services are most and initially accountable, but given the nature of the DPRK system of government, Kim himself cannot escape responsibility.”
Lee told the Washington Examiner: “The notion that Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader of the nation with the most rigidly vertical power hierarchy in history, was uninformed of the hostage-taking, torture, and extrajudicial killing of Otto Warmbier … is ludicrous.”
He added that Trump’s comments “challenge the letter and spirit of the landmark ruling by a federal judge in the case of Warmbiers vs DPRK” and “unwittingly empower the criminal regime of Kim Jong Un.”
Benjamin Hatch, the Warmbier family’s attorney, said Warmbier’s confession was “most likely dictated to him in advance and the product of torture and that one method of torture that North Korean interrogators have applied is using pliers or other tools to rearrange teeth.” All of the expert witnesses agreed that this confession was coerced.
In her ruling on the case, Judge Howell said the Warmbiers “have established North Korea’s liability to them” and, awarding punitive damages of $501,134,683.80, concluded: “North Korea is liable for the torture, hostage taking, and extrajudicial killing of Otto Warmbier, and the injuries to his mother and father, Fred and Cindy Warmbier.”
