President Trump said Thursday he spoke to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un about the death of American college student Otto Warmbier following his imprisonment in North Korea but does not believe Kim was aware of Warmbier’s captivity and ill treatment.
“In those prisons and camps, you have a lot of people, and some really bad things happened to Otto,” Trump told reporters during a press conference following the abrupt end of his summit with Kim in Hanoi, Vietnam, after the Washington Post’s David Nakamura asked the president if he’d confronted Kim about Warmbier’s death. “Some really, really bad things. But [Kim] tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”
[Trump: Otto Warmbier helped make North Korea summit possible]
Warmbier, a University of Virginia student, was detained at the Pyongyang airport in January 2016 and subsequently sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor for allegedly committing a “hostile act” against North Korea. Security footage purported to show Warmbier attempting to steal a banner hanging in his Pyongyang hotel.
Warmbier returned to the United States in a coma nearly 18 months later, when the Trump administration secured his release. Doctors concluded Warmbier had severe brain damage and said his condition was “unrecoverable.” North Korea alleged Warmbier contracted botulism and was given a sleeping pill, which left him in a coma. But American doctors were unable to find evidence of the illness.
Warmbier died less than a week after he returned to the United States, at the age of 22.
Trump invited Warmbier’s parents to his State of the Union address last year, calling them an “incredible family.” But while the president acknowledged confronting Kim about Warmbier’s detainment, Trump said he doesn’t believe “top leadership” in Pyongyang knew about it.
“I don’t believe that he would have allowed that to happen, just wasn’t to his advantage to allow that to happen,” Trump said of Kim. “Those prisons are rough places. They’re rough places, and bad things happened. But I really don’t believe that he was — I don’t believe he knew about it.”
Kim, the president added, “felt badly about it.”
“He knew the case very well, but he knew it later. You got a lot of people, a big country, a lot of people,” Trump said. Only a handful of Americans were imprisoned in North Korea at the same time as Warmbier.
The president met with Kim in Hanoi this week for a second summit, following their June 2018 meeting in Singapore, to continue negotiations over a joint agreement on North Korea’s denuclearization. The talks, however, ended early after the two sides reached a stalemate on sanctions, which Kim wanted lifted entirely.
