« He tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word. »
During President Donald Trump’s summit-ending news conference in Vietnam on Thursday, a reporter asked him if he’d confronted North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un about the treatment of Otto Warmbier, an American student who was imprisoned in North Korea for 15 months, only to return to the US in a comatose state in June 2017 and never recover.
The reporter noted that despite Warmbier’s brutal death, Trump has called Kim “ my friend ” and repeatedly boasted about their “great relationship.” The journalist then asked him, “Have you in Singapore [during the first Trump-Kim summit] or here confronted Kim Jong Un about Otto Warmbier’s death, asked him to take responsibility, and what did he say to you?”
Trump confirmed that he had — but went on to say he takes Kim’s word for it that he had nothing to do with it.
“I really believe something very bad happened to [Warmbier], and I don’t think that the top leadership knew about it,” Trump said . “I don’t believe that [Kim] would’ve allowed that to happen. It just wasn’t in his advantage to allow that to happen.”
Trump continued:
It’s hard to imagine that North Korea’s totalitarian dictator wasn’t aware of how a high-profile captive was treated — especially considering the show trial that Warmbier, who was arrested for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster, was forced to endure.
As Vox has previously detailed, the North Korean government claimed Warmbier “was left in a coma because of a food poisoning disease called botulism, but doctors were strangely unable to identify any trace of botulism or the cause of his deathly injuries.
