The parents of Otto Warmbier have rebuked President Trump for absolving North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un of responsibility for the death of their son after nearly a year and a half in regime custody.
“We have been respectful during this summit process,” Fred and Cindy Warmbier said in a message released Friday morning. “Now we must speak out. Kim and his evil regime are responsible for the death of our son Otto. Kim and his evil regime are responsible for unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity. No excuses or lavish praise can change that.”
Their comments come a day after Trump defended Kim during a press conference following their summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, which abruptly ended early after the pair couldn’t come to any agreement on Kim giving up his nuclear weapons program.
“I know the Warmbier family very well,” Trump said. “I think they’re an incredible family. What happened is horrible. I really believe something very bad happened to him, and I don’t think that the top leadership knew about it.”
[Opinion: The ‘America first’ president just gave Kim Jong Un cover for the murder of an American student]
Otto Warmbier was a University of Virginia undergraduate studying abroad in Hong Kong when he was detained in North Korea in January 2016 and charged with attempting to steal a propaganda poster hanging in his Pyongyang hotel. He was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor. U.S. officials worked to attain his release, and he returned in June 2017 to the United States in a comatose state, dying days later at the age of 22.
Trump emphasized that the young man was abused by North Korean officials. “Those prisons are rough. They’re rough places. And bad things happened,” the president said, but suggested Warmbier was the victim of rogue officials acting without Kim’s knowledge.
“I really don’t think it was in his interest at all,” Trump said of Kim. “Just wasn’t to his advantage to allow that to happen. … I really don’t believe that he was — I don’t believe he knew about it.”
Those remarks drew bipartisan criticism. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who worked with the Cincinnati-based family to help secure their son’s release, said in a statement, “We must remember Otto, and we should never let North Korea off the hook for what they did to him.”
Bill Richardson, the New Mexico Democrat who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and has visited North Korea for other hostage cases, also derided the president’s assessment. “It is totally impossible,” Richardson said Thursday. “It is inconceivable that such a high-profile American prisoner like Otto Warmbier, that Kim Jong Un would not know.” Only a handful of Americans were in North Korean custody at the same time as Warmbier.
